Quiznos Night!

Megan loves her some Quiznos - especially their broccoli cheddar soup, which was weirdly the best in town. You may have noticed I wrote "was."

Unfortunately all the Quiznos shops in Great Falls have closed, and we didn't find out until we recently tried to go there for toasted subs and soup and to our dismay found the building empty.

We weren't going to let something like a restaurant closing prevent us from eating at it though! In honor of the departed fast food sub shop, we put together our own take on the broccoli cheddar soup and toasted sandwiches.

It seems likely the restaurant probably uses freeze dried or powdered broccoli, but that's not how we roll at home, so of course we're going with fresh broccoli - a whole mess of it!

Once the broccoli is chopped, we got down to the arduous task of grating a whole bag of baby carrots.

As with many soups, we'll be starting ours by cooking diced onions and several cloves of diced garlic in a tablespoon of oil. Put in a few tablespoons of flour and butter to make a roux, which will cause the soup to thicken as it cooks.

After the onion softens and the garlic becomes fragrant, we add in our primary liquid ingredients: half and half, evaporated milk, and homemade chicken stock. For a creamier soup, you could instead use heavy cream, but it also adds a lot more fat.

When it starts to heat through, we add in our chopped broccoli florets, shredded carrot, and 8 oz. of shredded sharp cheddar (it's not, as you might suspect, Velveeta) and let it simmer.

Eventually it will start to thicken and you'll get a consistency that is amazingly close to what we had at Quiznos.

But what about the sandwiches? Here we've cut some wheat bolillo rolls in half and slathered with them a mixture of mayo and sun-dried tomato infused garlic, then layered on sliced tomato, turkey, and cheese.

Since Quiznos toasts their subs, we decided to go the same route, putting the sandwiches under the broiler for about two minutes.

And here's the finished product - a bowl of soup even better than its inspiration and a custom made toasted sandwich. The restaurant may be gone, but it's spirit will live on in our kitchen whenever the urge strikes!