Cheddar Ale Soup

Here's recipe number two for today. Again, both can be found here. Before I dive too much into the recipe, let me just say: the beer aisle of the grocery store really needs to be more dummy friendly. Husband and I don't drink, so I had absolutely no idea how to pick a decent pale ale. Not to mention I only needed a cup of the stuff. The smallest amount I could find was a pint. "This my friend, is a pint!" Lord of the Rings, anyone? No? Alright.
Moving on! I chopped up all my veggies and Husband grated the cheese and measured the ale before I got started cooking just to make my life a little easier.

Since Husband invited some friends over, I wasn't totally on top of my game of photographing the steps in the recipe. Sorry. But here's what it looked like before I blended everything up in my Ninja (we don't have an immersion blender) and added the cheese.

And here's the finished product:

The verdict was this: the pretzel bowls were extremely well received. We just ripped them into chunks and dipped the chunks in the soup since they ended up too flat to be used as actual bowls. Loved on all accounts. The soup itself was not so fabulous. The two recipes need each other. The soup is good with the pretzel, but by itself it's not that great. So I guess I'd have to say 4 big stars for the pretzel bowls from everybody, and a consensus of 2.5-3 stars for the soup. I can't say if I'll be making this again, as the soup can't really stand up on it's own, but the pretzel recipe is a definite keeper. Argh.