Anyone Still Out There?

I know I haven't bothered to update in a long time. I'm a horrible blogger. A large part of it is that I've been working evenings six days a week for the last two months and that really cuts down on the amount that I cook. It's sad. Also, Jody's camera is currently dead and we can't find the battery charger so we're short on pictures as well.

But last night I pulled out my piece of crap Canon and we made Guinness cheese soup. The recipe here is a little bit misleading in that it claims the recipe serves four people. I cut the thing in half and that would easily serve four. I mean really... three quarts of soup for four people? Maybe if they don't want to walk, talk or move for two hours...

Guinness. Meal in a can. Really almost a stew in itself. Best served cold with a spoon.


Cheese. In this case, aged cheddar from the insanely tasty Forfar Cheese Factory in Ontario. My parents were kind enough to bring some back for me when they went for a family wedding.

The whole thing starts off with butter. Quite a bit of butter. And some onion.


Now, I didn't saute the onion as long as I probably should have. Looking back I should have let it go longer to get some nice brown colour and flavour. But I didn't. The soup didn't really suffer as a result.


To the artery clogging pool of butter we add an equally large amount of flour and cook that for a few minutes to make a nice roux. This will make the soup thicken up nicely and prevent the butter from turning it into a horrible oil slick.

This is where my picture taking gets a little bit shoddy. I blame three things for this. The first is that I was cooking. The second is that the recipe only uses half a cup of Guinness, leaving me to finish off the rest of the can.

This is the third. I bought this wine at the Kensington Wine Market last week because they had a big sale on and the label was funny. It was also fairly cheap. Thankfully it was also tasty and I didn't buy the "You Are What You Drink" bag the lady at the counter suggested. Also, please try to ignore the funny hair growth on my face. It's a work in progress and doesn't look as silly in person as it does in this picture. Honest.

But enough about my suspect wine purchasing. Once the roux is cooked a bit we added vegetable stock, beer, half and half (in place of the heavy cream), salt and dry mustard. All of this simmered for about forty minutes to thicken and to allow Jody and I to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Once I was happy with the texture of the soup (or impatient enough...) the cheese went in and continued to cook for another ten minutes or so. Spooned happily into bowls and served with cheese buns it was a nice comforting meal.

I swear I'll try to get posts up more regularly. Sunday night cooking is about all that we get around to these days but hopefully I can get around to a Monday post. Or maybe I'll find a new job and actually cook more than twice a week.