This creamy soup is full of broccoli, and cheesy tasting without all of the saturated fat in the traditional version!
I love when I come across recipes that are really easy to throw together, use ingredients I usually have on hand already, and taste great. I love broccoli and usually have some of it in my fridge at all times, and the other day I had two bunches of it and wanted to do something different other than steaming or roasting as a side dish. I found this recipe on the Love and Lemons blog, and since I hadn’t had broccoli cheese soup in years, I decided to try it. It was very easy, and thick and cheesy tasting!
I modified the recipe to cook everything in one pot, so they were fewer dishes to wash, and I use hemp seeds instead of cashews. Cashews are commonly used in plant-based recipes to mimic the creamy texture of dairy products due to their unsaturated fat content. However, cashews have a hard outer shell that contains a urushiol, the chemical found in poison ivy. The cashews are processed in developing countries where the shell has to be removed by hand, and the urushiol can cause caustic burns. I’ve decided to limit my cashew consumption in order to reduce the exploitation of these workers. You can use sunflower seeds, hemp seeds, unsweetened nut or seed butters, or silken tofu as replacements for cashews in many recipes.
Nutritional yeast is what gives this recipe it's cheesy flavor. If you've never heard of it before, you can read this article from WebMD to learn more, and there are several articles on the benefits of it on the Nutrition Facts site. Most brands are fortified with vitamin B12, and I usually use Bragg's nutritional yeast as it contains the most B12 compared to other common brands.
I hope you enjoy this broccoli "cheese" soup! Please let me know in the comments if you made it and what you thought!