Beer & Cheese Soup

Today I came home from work and for some reason I had a desire to make some beer & cheese soup. I've only actually had it once or twice before, but I always remember it being tasty. I also enjoy the fact that it has beer in it. After a quick recipe search in google, I discovered that I already had most of the ingredients! Hooray! I used a variation of this recipe. Some ingredients I didn't have, so I substituted others. Also, I'm not a big fan of measuring, so I kind of eyeballed some stuff.


The first thing to do was to saute some onions and celery. I'm not 100% sure on what saute means. I think it means to fry up whatever it is you are sauteing in oil or margerine or whatever, so that's what I did.


I didn't have any celery, so I used half of a hot pepper that I had in the fridge.


The next step was to add some flour and garlic salt and some other spices to the mix. Garlic salt I could understand, but I was kinda doubtful about the flour. I've never heard of flour going into a soup before, and it seemed like I was supposed to add a lot, but I thought what the hey, I'll try it. What else am I going to use my flour for anyways?


This is what things looked like after I added the flour and garlic salt. My doubts at this time were increasing. If anything I thought I was going to have a messy pot to clean up afterwards.


Next was to add some chicken stock and the cheese. The recipe called for 8 oz of cheese. I wasn't too sure how much this was, so I just grated half a brick. You can never have too much cheese, that's what I say.


It was starting to look like soup, but it there were still some pretty big clumps of stuff in the bottom. It was kinda like melty cheese-flour porridge with yellow chicken liquid on top.


The final ingredient: a can of beer.


This is what it looked like after adding the beer. It got all foamy and wierd looking. At this point I was like "oh crap.. I've wasted a beer" Things eventually settled down though and after a few minutes of boiling the foam and the melty cheese flour clumps went away and it actually looked like soup.


The finished product. It was actually not bad. The first few spoonfuls were pretty tasty, but after awhile I realized it was a bit heavy on something. I'm thinking either garlic salt or flour or both. It was pretty filling too, I was stuffed after the one bowl. I have some leftover, and I'm hoping it will taste even better in a day or two. I think that's how it usually works with soup type things. If not then I'll just add more beer when I reheat it. Can't go wrong there ;)