I declare fall to be here.

Soups are one of my favorite things about fall.

I’m sure now that I am in full fall mode, we will have an Indian summer and I will have to turn my AC back on.

I like my soups thick.

Now that I’ve gotten all that out of the way, let’s talk about this over the top cheesy soup. Recently, I became acquainted with a new girl in town. She is here for a year finishing her Ph.D. in psychology. She is from Louisiana and has the charms of true Southern Belle. Sadly for her, she had to leave her new husband behind, as he’s finishing medical school.

We met and hit it off. I invited her over for dinner since she doesn’t know many people around here. But at our first meeting she revealed a factoid about herself. She’s a pescatarian, she eats fish but no other meat. Now, I have made vegetarian and vegan food, but usually by accident. Usually I realize halfway through the recipe that it is, so continue on.

But the pressure of making a dish fully vegetarian was so daunting. Then I thought, soup! I can do a soup. I set out to make my soup. Prepped what I could the night before and then realized I always use chicken broth. I couldn’t do that this time. The next morning I ran to the store to buy vegetable broth. I made my purchase and went home.

As I got started on making the soup, I poured the stock into the pan, and discovered it was BROWN. My soup was to be creamy in color, maybe a little yellowish, but not brown! That being said, the flavor of the vegetable stock was intense. I loved it.

Turns out, vegetable stock works just fine with soup. Who knew? (Everyone but me.)

Since I was going vegetarian, I decided to make it gluten free as well by thickening with cornstarch versus flour. Also my broth was unsalted, so I had to give my shaker quite the shake to get the salt up to par.