Butternut Squash Soup with Beer and Cheese

It's only appropriate that bloggers from Wisconsin would eventually blog about beer cheese soup, right? But, you might not expect us to add butternut squash to the list of ingredients.
But, you know us. We like sneaking vegetables in anywhere we can. We also love a nice, hot bowl of soup on a chilly autumn evening... and everything is better with a bit of beer and cheese in it, right?

This particular soup is also easy enough to crank out on a weeknight. Doing a bit of chopping ahead of time could also speed up the process.

You start off by peeling and dicing a nice sized butternut squash.
And dicing a bit of cheese. In this particular case, we opted for a nice, aged gouda that we found at the farmer's market.
Sautee some onions and garlic in a bit of butter and olive oil.
Then, add the squash along with some chicken (or veggie) broth. And bring everything to a boil.
After simmering the soup until the squash is nice and tender, it's time to puree it. You can do this in batches in a blender. Or just get out your handy-dandy immersion blender (which is an indispensable tool in our kitchen).
Once everything is nicely homogenized, you can whisk in some of that gorgeous cheese... and then you'll pour in the beer (to taste).
Serve with a few chopped scallions.

You can bump things up a notch by plating the soup a bit better, and adding a whorl of cream.
But, we weren't being quite that fussy on this particular night.

We enjoyed this week's batch of soup with a side of apple-kraut quesadillas (actually minus the kraut, since we didn't have any local kraut on hand).

If you're an exacting sort, here are the proportions:
Butternut Squash Soup with Beer and Cheese


©BURP! Where Food Happens