Bacon & Broccoli Cheddar Soup

I grew up in New England, which means I should be accustomed to the cold weather.  I'm not.  Schmambs grew up all over, but she wasn't engineered to withstand cold weather.  Since our daily threats of moving to a warmer climate didn't seem to be getting us anywhere, we decided we should make soup instead.  A recent issue of Food Network Magazine featured a delicious-looking broccoli cheddar soup on the cover.  We like cheese.  We like broccoli.  We like hot bowls of soup on cold wintry days.


Oddly, it was Schmambs, not me, that came up with the idea of slightly altering the recipe by adding bacon to the soup.  As any sane person would tell you, bacon makes everything better.  Am I right?  In goes the bacon.

This recipe called for all hands on deck.  While the bacon was frying, Schmambs took care of cutting the onion and celery while the kido peeled potatoes and even though I was supposed to be helping with the potatoes, I took pictures.  Eventually I had to abandon the camera and take over potato peeling from the kido.  She was doing a great job, but we were looking to eat before the new year and tummies were starting to grumble.

The recipe called for two unusual ingredients that had Schmambs and I scratching our heads for a while, contemplating the texture of the final product.  Russet and sweet potatoes.  Not a fan of the sweet potato, I wasn't sure I was going to like the flavor of the soup.  The kido doesn't like "sweet tomatoes" and declared that she wasn't going to have any soup for dinner that night.  

  

   

With everything sliced and diced, we were finally ready to start building the soup.  We cooked the celery and onion in the bacon fat before transferring them into a pot with the potatoes, half and half, chicken broth, water, and bay leaf.  When the potatoes became tender, it was time for them to meet their fate with the blender's blades.  Schmambs was not equipped with an industrial size blender, so we had to puree the soup in batches.  Of course, our first instinct after pureeing the first batch was to taste.  Without the cheese or broccoli, I'll be honest...it tasted like a sweet potato puree.

   

    

Veggies are not very popular at la Casa de Schmambs.  Will eats the occasional greenery, but the kido tries to avoid them at all costs.  But there's no getting around your veggies if they're chopped up and mixed in an ooey gooey delicious soup, is there?  Especially when the soup is made out of cheese.  

With the broccoli thrown in, it was starting to look a lot more like the picture on the magazine cover.  Even though the recipe instructed us to cook the broccoli prior to adding it to the soup, we decided to forego that step.  The reason is simple.  We wanted  our soup to look exactly like the soup in the magazine picture and we didn't think the broccoli would hold its shape in the thick soup if it was cooked.

    

Onto my favorite part.  The bacon, of course!  Schmambs did a fantastic job at chopping the crispy slices into so many little pieces that I got a little bacon in every spoonful of this soup.  I think the bacon even won the kido over who, after tasting the final product, changed her mind about "sweet tomatoes" since she couldn't taste them and asked to have a bowl of soup for dinner.  We told her we had figured she'd like it and already had a bowl ready for her.  With all the ingredients mixed together, we decided that next time we need to reduce the amount of sweet potatoes since it was still a little too sweet for our liking.  However, it was incredibly delicious and truly hit the spot.

While planning the dinner menu one night, we decided that we were going to serve our soup in bread bowls.  Everyone else does it.  Why should we be any different?  So an idea was born.  Originally we thought it would be easy to pick a few up pre-made ones from the local grocery store.  The store we went to didn't have them.  Bummer.  Most people would shrug and eat soup from a regular bowl.  Oh no.  Schmambs and I were determined (and ambitious) to have our soup from a bread bowl.  When we explained our quest for bread bowls to the guy working in the bakery, he directed us to pizza dough.  He told us we should be able to get the same result.  He was right.  Thankfully Schmambs has some bread smarts since I would've been clueless otherwise.  After proofing the dough, Schmambs brushed some egg wash over the dough to hopefully give it a nice golden color.  

We did it!  I never doubted Schmambs, but I was impressed that it turned out successful, since there had been some doubtful moments.  Clearly you cannot ladle soup into big balls of bread.  Something had to be done.  Schmambs took control.  A little cut here, a little scoop there, voila!

Dinner is served.  

Bacon Broccoli Cheddar Soup

adapted from the Broccoli Cheddar Soup from Food Network Magazine

1 medium onion, finely chopped

2 stalks celery, finely chopped

2 cups chicken broth

2 cups half and half

1 pound russet potatoes, peeled and chopped

1 pound sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped

1 bay leaf

2 cups broccoli florets, chopped

salt and pepper

1/3 lb sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

1 lb bacon

Fry the bacon in a skillet.  Once the bacon is done, lay on paper towels to drain excess oil.  In the bacon grease left in the skillet, add the onion and celery and cook over medium-high heat until softened.  In a large pot, combine the onion and celery with chicken broth, half and half, potatoes, bay leaf, 2 cups of water and a pinch of salt & pepper.  Bring contents in the large pot to a boil before reducing the heat to a medium low and simmer until the potatoes are tender, stirring occasionally.  Cook Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat.

When the potatoes are tender, remove the bay leaf from the soup and transfer the contents of the large pot into the blender.  You can repeat this step in small batches if your blender isn't big enough.  Simmer the blended mixture in the pot while adding the cheese and stirring until melted.

Ladle soup into bowls and enjoy!

Shepherd's Pie Eggrolls

Every year for my birthday, Schmambs makes me dinner.  How is that different from every other night?  For starters, I get to choose the menu.  The best part about Schmambs is that she will cook anything my little Asian heart desires, even if she's never made it before.  Last year was easy.  We had a Thanksgiving Feast since she makes this amazing bacon turkey.  This year, I had Shepherd's Pie on the mind after stumbling across a recipe for a Sweet Potato Chipotle Sheperd's Pie from the Deen Brothers (you know, Paula's boys).  Not a fan of sweet potatoes, I thought it would be fun to have a traditional Shepherd's Pie.  Then, since Schmambs and I have been brainstorming eggroll recipes for the fast approaching football season, we thought we would try Shepherd's Pie Eggrolls.  And to make it that much better, we were going to add bacon to the mix.


Schmambs has this amazing ability to multi-task.  If it were left to me, I'd probably burn the house down.  This is probably why I leave all the more elaborate dishes to be made at Schmambs' rather than when I'm home alone.  She had the bacon cooking while she browned the ground beef.





After the beef was browned, she drained it and mixed in some whole kernel corn and fresh chopped celery.  A typical Shepherd's Pie calls for carrots, peas, and onions.  Schmambs cut up an onion and tossed it in the skillet to be cooked before adding it to the beef, corn, and celery mixture.  Schmambs isn't a fan of peas (I don't love 'em, but don't mind them) and I am not particularly fond of cooked carrots, so we decided to leave those out and substitute with the celery.

   

Once the onions were done cooking, she added them in as well.

Are you drooling yet?  Remember that bacon that Schmambs had been frying?  It was now time to add that crispy bacon.  To ensure a piece of bacon in every bite, Schmambs chopped all the strips up before throwing it in the beef mixture.  In a traditional Shepherd's Pie, the beef mixture is covered with mashed potatoes.  We couldn't leave those out.  Instead of slaving away at mashed potatoes from scratch, we took the shortcut and made instant mashed potatoes.  We're not proud of it, but the project was already labor intense and hungry stomachs needed to be fed.  And to be quite honest, they weren't all that terrible when combined with all the other ingredients and fried.

  

Then comes the fun part of putting the eggrolls together.  Despite all the eggrolls we have made in the past, we are still trying to perfect the rolling process.  Some come out too fat.  Some resemble blobs more than eggrolls.  The insides of the Shepherd's Pie eggrolls look a little something like this.  Oh yeah, did I mention that we threw some cheese into the mix too?  This cheese happened to be a Mexican blend from Jalapeno Nachos we made the other night.  I would probably recommend a Cheddar cheese if you were going to try making these at home.

We used a package of eggroll wrappers and decided that we probably had enough eggrolls to feed an army and we would save the remaining mixture to make more eggrolls another night.  Schmambs heat the oil up and in went the eggrolls.  Pop pop pop went the oil.  Sizzle sizzle sizzle went the eggrolls.  Before long we had a pile of piping hot Shepherd's Pie eggrolls ready to be consumed.

A traditional Shepherd's Pie has the beef in a gravy.  Since we were making it in eggroll form, we didn't want too much liquid in the filler since that gives the eggrolls more opportunities to leak when we're frying them, so we decided to dip them in gravy.  Nothing hard.  A package of Brown Gravy from McCormick's and call it a day.  We were famished by the time we finished that I wanted to get a picture of the final product and dig in, so regretfully, I do not have a picture of the eggroll with all it's gravy goodness, but it was delicious.

B.L.T.'s

So, I know this blog is supposed to be about foods 'Beyond Bacon' but every now and then, it's good to get back to your roots.  Also, Schmambs & Company were about to embark on a 10 day vacation and had bacon that needed to be used before they left.  So we had good ol' fashioned B.L.T.'s.

To get things started, one needs bacon.  What's a B.L.T. without any B?  So Schmambs cooked the bacon while her hubby sliced the tomatoes.  Me, being the mooch that I am...well...I just sat at the kitchen table waiting for everything to be ready.  At least I contributed my good company!

I will be the first to admit that a plate full of cooked bacon usually does not last very long in my house.  Thankfully, we were not eating at my house and therefore, the bacon stayed on the preparation plate until the sandwiches were ready to be put together.  We used a pretty basic make-it-yourself method since it was about 90 degrees inside and outside and it wasn't fair to make one person sweat to feed everyone else.  Thanks to Will, we had a nice neat stack of tomatoes ready to be piled high.  I'm not a fan of juicy tomatoes (I like mine firm) so I just scooped off the seeds and the ooey gooey in the middle.  And the lettuce was basically a 'you tear it, you eat it' type situation.

I found that each person likes to eat their B.L.T. a little differently.  Myself, I like it simple.  Just the B, the L, and then the T.  No mayo since I am not much of a fan.  Schmambs & hubby enjoy tossing a little salt & pepper on their B.L.T.'s.  The pepper to bring some flavor out in the bacon and the salt to bring a little extra out on the tomatoes. Schmambs also seems to like loading on the L because her sandwich looked about twice the size of mine - and with a lot more green!  I'm not a big fan of whole wheat bread since I find that it is drier than white bread, so I thought I would dab a little bit of mayo on to see if it helped give a bit of moisture.  It did.  I then got intrigued and tried the salt & pepper too.  One of the best B.L.T.'s I've had in a while.  Some people would say you don't need the salt since you already have enough from the bacon, but I think that the salt isn't for the bacon aspect, but definitely gives the tomato a little more umph.  

Moral of the story?  B.L.T.'s are the perfect dinner when you need to get rid of some bacon on a really really really hot day.

Bacon Chipotle Cheese Burgers

"I was thinking of making BLT's for dinner.  Interested?"  This was not the text message I wanted to receive from Schmambs on a day where I already had dinner plans.  It was hard turning down bacon.  Even harder to turn down Schmambs since we hadn't seen each other in a couple of days, which is somewhat unsual.  Not to be knocked down, she waited a couple hours before sending another text.  "Bacon Chipotle Cheese Burgers tomorrow night.  You in?"  Oh SNAP.  This woman knows how to play dirty.  She knows my weakness, which is nice for my tummy, but not so much my arteries!  How can you turn down not only BACON but CHIPOTLE CHEESE as well?  You don't.  It's just unheard of.  

I missed the preparation segment, but I got there just in time for the "it's almost cooked and ready to eat" part.  So while I don't have any recipes to share with you today (I'm almost sure Schmambs plans on taking the recipe to the grave), I do have some delicious Bacon Chipotle Cheese Burger pics for you to feast your eyes on.

The adults got nice big juicy burgers and the kido got the mini burger (on the bottom left).  Can you just smell the beefy oniony melty cheesiness?  The house smelled like these burgers for the next few hours.  It was wonderful.

The plate of bacon that we used to top the burgers.  (I couldn't resist taking a picture of it in all its glory.)  If you can believe it, all the strips were present and accounted for when the burgers hit the table.  Willpower is a tough thing.

Schmambs made all the veggies look so pretty.  I wonder if she believes that if it looks good, she'll get us to eat our daily serving of vegetables.  I don't need pretty bribes.  I love my roughage and tomatoes!  In hindsight, I am regretful that I didn't put more tomatoes on my burger.  Next time.

My burger before I closed it up and sunk my chompers into it.  Beef patty topped with Cabot Chipotle Cheddar Cheese, a strip of bacon (I had to leave some for the others!), ketchup, lettuce, and tomato.  Mouth, be prepared to party.

Baked Bacon Mac & Cheese

I've made baked mac & cheese twice.  Both times, I was under the watchful eye of Schmambs.  But one Sunday, in an effort to reduce the number of times of eating out during the week, I thought I would try making baked mac & cheese.  Solo.  Ohmygoodness.  I can't even tell you how many text messages flew back and forth between Schmambs and myself as I perused up and down the aisles of the grocery store hoping to pick up everything I would need for the recipe.  The first time we made it, we used a recipe off All Recipes.  It was phenomenal.  But then Schmambs discovered Alton Brown's recipe on Food Network and I mean, how do you say no to Panko?  That's right.  You don't!

The first step is to start cooking the pasta while you make the cheese sauce.  I sort of had to because I only have one big pot and I needed that for cooking the pasta and making the cheese sauce.  With the pasta cooking, I thought I would get the liquid ingredients started  so that all I would have to add was the cheese once the pasta was finished cooking.  

One of the things I love about homemade mac & cheese is that you, the chef, can determine the thickness of your sauce by creating a roux.  For those of you who don't know what a roux is, Merriam-Webster defines it as "a cooked mixture of flour and fat used as a thickening agent in a soup or a sauce".  In vivz terms, it's a thickener consisting of butter, flour, and some sort of liquid.  In the case of baked mac & cheese, the liquid is milk.  Once the butter is melted in the saucepan, you whisk in the flour.  As per the recipe, along with the flour, I added mustard powder.  It sounds a bit odd...mustard powder in baked mac & cheese...really?!  But it gives the cheese sauce a nice flavor while not being overwhelming.  And since I forgot the onion at the store (it must've been all the texting back and forth that I got distracted!) I substituted with onion powder.

         

flour, mustard powder, onion powder, salt

One thing that surprised me was that the recipe called for milk and not cream.  The other recipe that we had tried required cream.  A lot of it!  Alton seems to know what he's doing, so I figured it might be a good idea to just follow his directions since he was the only help I was going to get this time around.  In went the milk and then all of a sudden I found myself with a saucepan full of watery milky yellow stuff.  The directions told me to let it simmer, so I did while I took the pasta off the stove and drained it.

                                                                  

Now while the sauce was getting all simmered and cooked and stuff, I decided to take the time to make some bacon.  Somewhere along the line, I had decided I was going to try this recipe with bacon.  Why?  Because I'm a firm believer that bacon makes everything better.  I eat meals which consist of bacon.  Nothing else.  And I think I've mentioned before, I enjoy mnicrowave bacon, which I'm not sure if that's a good thing to admit, so let's move on.  I took the shortcut of making microwave bacon because I was on a time crunch and because I still haven't perfected the art of making bacon on the stove.  A story for another time.  I couldn't help but salivate while looking at my plate of bacon.  It took a lot of will power to not eat any all of it while I prepared the cheese sauce. 

    

As you can see, the cheese sauce turned out a bright orange/yellow and it was melty and gooey.  I mixed in the elbow macaroni in the sauce when it was all ready and then I mixed in crumbled pieces of bacon into the pasta/sauce mixture.  Not that it needed it, I let the mixture sit for a few minutes while I prepared the panko topping.  I melted butter in a skillet and then mixed in about a cup of panko breadcrumbs.  I'm not sure if I overestimated my skillet's abilities, but the topping didn't end up like it should have.  The butter did not evenly distribute throughout the panko so it caused some of the breading to eventually just sprinkle off, despite being baked into the mac and cheese.  I also did go a little overboard with loading the tops of the mac & cheese with panko.  I guess there is such thing as too much when it comes to breadcrumbs.  The lessons we learn.

I ended up making two separate pans of the mac and cheese because a) I used LARGE elbow macaroni so it took up a lot more space and b) I'm a single young professional and there's only so much food i can consume before it goes bad.  So I was going to drop a pan off with Schmambs & Company and have them be the guinea pigs to my cooking.  I'll admit, after giving it a whirl, I realized it was a bit bland and I could have done so much more with it.  


Baked Mac & Cheese:
(adapted from Alton Brown's recipe)


* 1/2 box large elbow macaroni
* 3 tablespoons butter
* 3 tablespoons flour
* 1 tablespoon powdered mustard
* 3 cups milk
* 1 tablespoon onion powder
* 1/2 teaspoon paprika
* 12 ounces sharp cheddar, shredded
* 1 teaspoon kosher salt 
* Fresh black pepper
* 8 slices of bacon, crumbled (this is only a suggestion.  use as much bacon as you want!
* 3 tablespoons butter (for the topping)
* 1 cup panko breadcrumbs (for the topping)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling water until it's "al dente".  Drain the pasta when done.  While the pasta is cooking, melt 3 tablespoons of butter in another saucepan or pot.  Whisk in the flour, mustard powder, and onion powder until it's lump-free.  Slowly mix in the milk and paprika.  Make sure everything is mixed evenly and there are no lumps.  Then let the mixture simmer for about ten minutes.

While it's simmering, cook 8 strips (or however many slices desired) of bacon.  Let the oil drain and then crumble it up.  Put aside.  Stir in the cheese (a little bit at a time) to the milky mixture.  Stir until cheese is all melted and your mixture is all gooey.   Add salt and pepper to your liking.  Then add the bacon.  Once everything is evenly mixed, pour it into the macaroni and stir until all the pasta is evenly coated.  

While you're mixing the pasta and cheese together, melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan.  When it's melted, add the panko breadcrumbs and coat it evenly with the butter.  Depending on what type of pan you're using, you may want to spray it with some sort of cooking spray.  My spray of choice is PAM.  This will keep the cheese sauce from sticking to the edge.  Once everything is done, distribute the pasta and sauce in two 8x8 pans.  I just used disposable aluminum square pans and they seemed to work fine.  Distribute the panko breadcrumbs over the macaroni in both pans.  Place pans in oven which should be 350 degrees and bake for 30 minutes.  I can usually tell it's done once the breadcrumbs start to brown.  You don't want to overcook it or you'll have dry mac & cheese.