Homemade Cream of Celery Soup

Today for lunch, I made cream of celery soup. I was a little leery of it because I wasn't sure how much of a meal it was going to be. I still don't think it had enough protein, since it just came from dairy products, but it was much better than I was expecting. It is definitely not the same as heating up a can of cream of celery soup and adding the milk or water. Even though I use the cans in recipes, eating them plain just seems too gross to me. Also, this recipe can easily be modified to make just about any cream of soup you want. It is of course more time consuming than opening up a can but because it tastes so much better and is arguably healthier, it might be worth it. However, by no means is this soup healthy. Yes, it has celery in it but that's about it. It also has lots of butter and other fats.

I made a few adjustments to the original recipe so I will write mine out for you.

Ingredients:

• 6 stalks of celery (non-organic but we don't buy organic anything), chopped small (and next time I will chop them even smaller)
• a couple shakes of garlic powder
• a couple shakes of onion powder (I got too lazy after chopping all the celery to find the energy to cut the onions too but I may change that for the future)
• I misread the directions and used 1/2 cup of butter instead of 1/4 and next time, I will cut it down (although this way was delicious too)
• 1/3 cup flour
• 1 1/2 cups of water with the chicken flavoring from a ramen mixed in (usually what we use for chicken broth)
• 1 cup 1% milk
• about 1/4 cup sour cream (to make it thicker since we didn't have cream or whole milk and we had this on hand)
• a pinch of salt (I was careful not to use too much because the ramen is so salty)
• a pinch of sugar

Then I followed the same directions as the original but I only simmered for 7 minutes instead of 15. I also turned the heat down to medium-low instead of medium because mine kept sticking. I think the full 15 minutes would've made it took thick.

The recipe said that it makes the equivalent of two cans of cream of soup but I have to disagree with this. We barely got 3 servings out of it (and that's food pyramid servings, not what people actually eat servings). It was very very good, even on its own and we will definitely make it again. We also think it might make a good sauce for something or be good if you add some potatoes.