Roasted Cauliflower Beer & Cheese Soup

Winter.is…..here. It’s snowy, it’s sleeting, it’s icy, it’s…..COLD.

But that’s nothing this delicious and *BURSTING* with flavor soup, can’t fix.

Jake helped me make this soup and when we got to the part where you put all the ingredients in the blender and puree into the freaking smoothest thing this side of, I don’t even know… he was a little concerned.

“Wait. What are you doing? You’re going to blend it all up? It looks good enough as it is. Are you sure?”

Truth is, he had a good point. The soup did look delicious and great as is, before blending. But seriously you guys….. don’t be tempted. The silky smooth creamy velvet texture that a Vitamix blender creates is out.of.this.world.Now we were  fortunate enough to have received a Vitamix as a wedding gift, but any high powered blender will work well (I’m told). I’m still learning the ways of the Vitamix and all the amazing things we can do with it. This was the first soup we made and I am SERIOUSLY impressed. I’ve obviously had a regular blender for most of my life and I’ve tried to make blended soups, both in the regular blender and also with an immersion blender. But seriously while those other two methods obviously work to a degree and definitely have their place in my kitchen for other tasks, I’ll never, EVER use either one again for the purpose of creating a smooth blend of ANYTHING(smoothies, soups, dips, hummus, etc…).

Yummm. I’m actually eating leftovers of this for lunch today so these pictures are making me hungry already. Even though the soup does have beer and cheese in it, because, why not? Oh and Bacon….we got a hearty 6 servings out of this batch of soup so for each serving you aren’t really indulging toooo much. But it will taste like you are. While eating this soup, it was like an EXPLOSION of flavor. So many of them. We both said aloud, “Wow, this is great. It’s like you can taste all the individual ingredients but yet they combine to make a kick a** combo!” Paraphrasing of course 🙂 And no lie, the leftovers were even better.

But it was really good, and overall pretty simple:
We used some pretty serious dark beer in ours, a dark ale from a local brewery, so our soup had some serious beer flavor, which we loved. But if you aren’t really into that, you could try a lighter brown ale (like Newcastle or something similar).

Additionally, you could make this vegetarian/vegan by omitting the bacon. If you did this, I would add an extra tbsp of oil when sauteing your veggies. I honestly still think it would be delicious even without bacon, so no fear of missing out on flavor!

Serve with some crusty bread or crunchy crackers and ENJOY!!!

xoxo