Broccoli WTF: A Yummy Soup Gone Horribly Wrong

On my personal family blog Rants & Raves, I often have a recurring feature called "_____ WTF." WTF -- "what the fuck" -- is basically a forum for me to bitch about something that's bugging me, or sharing a bizarre experience that defies all logic like when the cleaning ladies gave my newborn son a gigantic bear with a smoking addiction.

I think the same sort of post can be easily applied here to this food blog. So here we go. The first installment of WTF Foods.

One of my all-time favorite soups ever is Broccoli Cheddar Soup. It's creamy, rich, and so comforting when piping hot on a cold rainy day or when you're sick. I love it. I make it at home because it's so easy (but you need a blender or immersion blender!) and also get it at restaurants when I go out. But lately I've been seeing this incredibly easy soup dismembered. Beaten and tortured, then ladled into a ceramic bowl and served as literally a Crock of Shit.

It's not complicated. Boiled broccoli florets added to a trinity base (onion-carrot-celery), a small touch of garlic, salt and pepper of course, vegetable or chicken broth, then pureed in a blender only to be added back to a pot to have cream and sharp cheddar cheese added until thick and creamy, rich with the goodness of a fine medium-aged cheddar. You can literally make this soup half-wasted in 20 minutes. It's not hard.

But people fuck it up....

• too watery.....it needs to be creamy! this is not a fat-free soup! add the godamn cream! if you want fat-free, then get the fucking chicken noodle!
• too much carrots...this is called broccoli cheddar soup!
• wrong cheese...if you use mild you might as well use velveeta and if you use velveeta, then stop reading this blog. if you use too sharp a cheddar then it makes the broccoli taste bitter. you want good ol' fashioned american sharp cheddar like Cracker Barrell. trust me...

But my biggest pet peeve with this soup is this:

Seriously? Seriously???? Whole mother-fucking broccoli florets in the broccoli-cheddar soup? Really?! We're so lazy that we can't even put broccoli in a blender and press a button? REALLY?!

And to add insult to injury, the broccoli was grossly undercooked.

This monstrosity comes courtesy of Panera Bread and Cafe which normally is fabulous. I don't know who was smoking the hash pipe back there, but this does not a broccoli-cheddar soup make! And as a huge fan of this soup, I found this blatant laziness infuriating. And even now, 2 weeks later, looking at the picture and writing this blog...it still infuriates me.

I half-expected to see julienned red bell pepper, mushrooms, and squash too to complete the obvious I Just Threw A Bag of Costco Mixed Veggies In Here theme going on.

Ridiculous.

So please. Can we please agree on one thing? If the soup is supposed to be creamy and pureed, can we please press "on" and puree the fucking vegetables? Please? Pretty please??