Fall Favorites: Butternut Squash and Apples

I love butternut squash.  Along with apple, it's one of my favorite fall flavors.  Colby and I just went to the farmers market this morning to pick up some (amazing) bacon from Peach Creek Farms, sourdough from Texas French Bread, and some butternut squash because I can't get enough of it.

I know that I've posted two other butternut squash soup recipes, but this one combines techniques from both recipes and comes out tasting rich and flavorful.

roasted butternut squash and apple soup

2 lbs butternut squash
1 large carrot, diced
1 large celery, diced
1/2 medium yellow onion, diced
1/4 c pine nuts
1 lb apples, peeled and diced (I used a SweeTango, but any sweet apple would do well)
32 oz stock (I used chicken stock, but vegetable stock also works)
1 t ground ginger or 1/2 t nutmeg
1 T brown sugar
1/2 t soy sauce
salt+pepper
extra virgin olive oil

Peel and cube the butternut squash, toss with extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper and roast in a 400 F oven until the squash is easily pierced.  Depending on how small the cubes are, this can take anywhere from 20-40ish minutes.  Just keep checking.  I usually do this the day before I make the soup and put the squash the oven while I'm cooking other things.

In a large stock pot or dutch oven, heat a couple tbsps of evoo.  I kind of just eyeball it.  Add in the celery, carrots, and onions along with a big pinch of salt and saute until everything is softened. (Usually 5-10 minutes).  I tend to brown the onions to add an extra layer of flavor.

Make a well in the center of the pot and add in the pine nuts, careful to stir the nuts around so that they don't burn, but brown a bit.  (Usually a few minutes, but just watch it.)

Add in the apples and ginger and mix everything up.  Let the apples soften, but not turn to mush.  (~5 minutes)

Add in squash, chicken stock, brown sugar, and soy sauce and emulsify everything in the pot until smooth.

Taste for seasoning and adjust levels of salt and pepper.

The soup ends up tasting of both apples and butternut squash since the apples aren't cooked to mush.  The soy sauce helps with depth of flavor and is a really sneaky tasty way to adjust the seasoning. This is a great soup to make ahead of time because the flavors mesh together in the fridge.

Working lunch

Just a quick post on my lunch break.  We got fennel, butternut squash, and apples in our CSA.  It turns out that I don't actually like fennel because it tastes like licorice (you know, the gross kind, not the strawberry Twizzler version), so I needed a recipe that masked the anise-y flavor.  Enter: another version of butternut squash soup.  This one is super easy and it's just a chop and dump job, requiring a knife+cutting board, a pan, and a stick blender.


Butternut squash soup with fennel and apples
2 T extra virgin olive oil

1 2-2.5 lb butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into 1 in cubes
1 fennel bulb+ stems, diced
3-4 smallish apples, diced
3-4 c chicken stock
0.5 t nutmeg

0.5 t cayenne pepper (or more if you really like it spicy)
1 t smoked sweet paprika

s+p to taste


Heat up evoo in a large saucepan/stockpot.  Add fennel, butternut squash, and apples and sautee until the butternut squash can be easily pierced with a fork and everything is a little bit browned. 


Add in nutmeg, cayenne, and smoked sweet paprika, and stir to coat.  Cook for ~1 minute to let the spices toast a bit.


Add in chicken stock.  The amount sort of depends on how big your squash is, but make sure that there's enough liquid to stick blender it without it being too thin.


Season with salt and pepper to taste.

P.S. Check out Randi's post at Community Supported Home Cooking! :)

Chicken Noodle Soup for the crazy sick and lazy

I'm sort of surprised that I'm still awake and coherent right now.  I've found that the best way to go to sleep when one has some horrible combination of a sinus infection and the flu is to take more cold medicine than you're supposed to.  Don't try this one at home, kids.  Colby found Nyquil pills that also contain vitamin C.  This allows me to delude myself into thinking that at least it's "healthy" to overdo the cold meds. :)  But how did I even arrive at this point?  Well, it seems the best way to explain that is through recipe.

1 week in Boston

5 beers

10 days in Michigan

1 crazy new years

1 semi-lazy 'sband (but only when it comes to cooking)

1/2 T chicken bouillon

1/2-1 week in Seattle

1/2  C cooked (mostly plain) pasta

1.5 months poor sleeping habits

1 C water

1) Combine about 2 weeks of working constantly with dangerously high levels of stress.  Let marinate.  

2) Go to Boston for a week and continue lack of sleep, high stress.  Add some (~4) beers and friends with head colds.

3) Fly back to Austin with a tickle in your throat. Begin driving to Michigan about 18 hours after your return and spend the next 10 days schlepping back and forth across the great state.  Let that tickle grow into uncontrollable coughing and yellow, um, drainage.

4) Go to Urgent Care in Lansing and get a diagnosis of sinus infection and tell the doctor what they should give you when they ask you what *you* think you should be taking for it.  Promptly forget to take the antibiotics about 2 days into a 10 day course and then abandon it completely after 4 days.

5) Come back to Austin and have a wonderful New Years celebration, drinking more than you want to remember.  Be sure that your friends fly in from all over the country, bringing whatever they happened to catch on the connections from Dallas and Los Angeles.  Also, let the cedar count be out of control in Austin.  Marinate.

6) Spend a week feverishly working on a poster for the AAS meeting.  Don't do stupid things like spend that time sleeping and trying to recover.

7) Get to Seattle, see lots of people who are generally stressed out, sleep too little, have no regard for their health (because science always comes first), and have just flown in from across the globe.  Start to feel a bit better and then have a beer.

8) Spend the next two days in a state of delirium because you've just chosen the Fight Alcohol mode rather than Fight Germs mode for your liver.  Congratulations!  On top of your sinus infection, you now have the flu.

9) Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the 'sband that can be completely competent at cooking will be making a pound of pasta to eat.  Plain. Or, perhaps with butter... because it's way too much effort to make a real meal for himself.

10) Come home and be pathetic.  Demand that 'sband stays home and takes care of you.  When that fails, place a measuring cup with water and a bowl with the noodles in the microwave.  Pull out the bowl after a minute. Turn the microwave back on and let the water continue to heat.  Dump the water in the bowl, mix in the bouillon.  Vow to never return to a winter meeting of the AAS.

spinach and tomato tortellini soup and some meal planning

It's Austin Restaurant Week again and we're about to head out to Sullivan's Steakhouse for their ARW prix fixe menu. I promised Colby that we wouldn't eat out for awhile after this and I'm sort of trying to think about starting to eat healthy, so menu planning was in order.

Monday

lunch: spinach and tomato tortellini soup

dinner: chicken with mustard sauce, steamed broccoli, quinoa

Tuesday

lunch: broccoli + quinoa wrap

dinner: habanero chicken, spanish rice, grilled zucchini

Wednesday

lunch: spinach and tomato tortellini soup

dinner: spaghetti squash lasagna

Thursday

lunch: chicken fajitas

dinner: Korean tacos

Friday

lunch: bulgogi wrap

dinner: salmon and potato hash with poached eggs

And since, it seems, it's been forever since last I posted a recipe, here's how to make my stupidly easy (and cheater) spinach and tomato tortellini soup.

1/2 medium onion, diced

1 medium carrot, diced

1 medium celery stalk, diced

2 T olive oil

1 28 oz can diced tomatoes

32 oz (or so) stock (I used chicken, but vegetable stock works well too)

1-2 cloves garlic, crushed

9 oz package tortellini

1 can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

2 c lightly packed baby spinach

salt+red pepper flakes, to taste

In a large sauce pan or stock pot or some sort of cooking vessel heat olive oil.

Add in onion, celery, and carrots with about a 1/2 tsp of kosher salt. Sweat until the celery and onion become translucent and the carrots soften (about 5-6 minutes).

Add in tomatoes (liquids and all), crushed garlic, and stock and bring to a boil.

Add in the tortellini for however long they need. (I used a refrigerator package, so they only needed 4ish minutes.)

Reduce heat and add in the cannellini beans and spinach and stir until the spinach has wilted.

Season with salt and crushed red pepper flakes to taste.

So okay, fine, I've sort of semi-hoed this up, but it's better than going out for lunches this week .

tomato basil soup

I've been fighting with horrible data ever since I passed my defense. I often complain about the general quality of the data that I work with in my project, but right now I'm dealing with the "problem" stars and they are quite problematic. Instead of chucking my laptop across the room in frustration, I've found that cooking helps quite a bit. Today I made tomato basil soup because a) it's delicious b) Colby likes it and c) I bought a thermos for it specifically so I could take it to a picnic with me tomorrow.

Tomato basil soup:

3 T extra virgin olive oil
1/2 sweet onion, diced (I used a Texas 1015, which is by far my favorite onion)
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 28 oz cans of tomatoes (I used San Marzanos, but anything works here)
15 oz chicken stock
1/2 c heavy cream
3 T butter
2 T tomato paste
lots of basil, chopped (I used about 2.5 c, loosely packed)
salt+pepper to taste

Heat the evoo in a large pot. Once hot, add in the onions and a good pinch of salt and cook until softened and a bit brown about 5-10 minutes. Add in garlic and stir until fragrant, ~30s or so. Add in chicken stock and tomatoes and stick blender until mostly smooth...ish. Bring to a boil. Bring to medium heat and add butter, cream, tomato paste, and basil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with crusty bread.

salvage the vegetables before they rot (aka potato) soup

Actually, the title is sort of misleading... the potatoes weren't close to rotting but the celery, onion and carrots were.

Sometimes I buy vegetables because they're "good to have" and serve as a good base for a myriad of dishes. These usually include celery, carrots, onion, and garlic. I bought a whole bunch of stuff over the past several months and promptly forgot about them when I stopped cooking. Looking through my pantry this evening, I found a whole bunch of stuff that was about to go bad, so I threw it together to make a soup and it's pretty good.

Potato Cheese Soup

1 medium onion, diced
2 celery stalks, diced
2 medium-large carrots, peeled and diced
2 T olive oil
2-4 cloves garlic, grated
32 oz vegetable stock
32 oz chicken stock
7-8 medium yukon gold potatoes, peeled and roughly cubed
fresh parsley
celery leaves
grated cheddar cheese

Heat olive oil. Sweat onions, carrots, and celery and add a big pinch of salt. Stir occasionally. Add in chicken and veggie stock and bring to a boil. Add in garlic and then the potatoes. Bring it back to a boil and allow the potatoes to cook until tender. Stick blender it and then taste for seasoning. Add salt, if needed (probably so). Stir in parsley and celery leaves. In each bowl, garnish with a large helping a cheddar cheese and homemade croutons.

Thai-inspired butternut squash soup

I've been experimenting with butternut squash soup because I want to serve it as part of Thanksgiving dinner. I should probably decide soon enough because Colby's getting sick of it and Thxgvg is just around the corner with the added pressure of Colby's immediate family joining us for dinner. {begin rant} It was pretty awesome... they invited themselves at the last minute after I told everyone in the astronomy department that I would host the department's Thanksgiving party. Colby, being unable to control himself, was totally cool with the idea of his entire family showing up and so then I had to cancel the party because my crazy father-in-law asks me about the alignment of the planets and the year 2012 every *freaking* time I see him, so putting him around a bunch of proto-astronomers was just a bad idea.{end rant} *ahem* where was I?

Oh, right. soup.

My friend pointed me to the Whole Foods recipe for butternut squash soup and it's a great base and I began to experiment from that. My favorite incarnation of it thus far has been Thai inspired and is what we ate for dinner tonight.

1 medium butternut squash, roasted
1 T butter
2 T olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ginger, grated
2 T pine nuts
1 T brown sugar
1 T red curry paste
1/2 medium onion, diced
2 medium carrots, peeled and diced
1 large stalk of celery, diced
32 oz vegetable stock, homemade is preferred
salt+pepper

To roast the squash set the oven to 400 and split the squash in half. Take out the seeds and rub 1/4 T butter on both of the cut sides. Season with salt and pepper and place in the oven cut side up for about 35-45 minutes, or until the flesh is easily pierced with a knife. Meanwhile, heat the remaining 1/2 T of butter with the olive oil in a stockpot. Add in garlic and ginger and stir until fragrant (~30s). Add in the onion, carrots, celery, and pine nuts and about 1 tsp kosher salt. Let this sweat for a few minutes until the veggies soften. Add in the curry paste and stir until the veggies are all coated and everything starts to smell awesometastic. Add in the vegetable stock and the brown sugar and let the mixture heat through. Add in the squash and attack with a stick blender until smooth.

This could also be served with a tiny dollop of creme fraiche to help cut through the heat. It's a little spicy, but in a really good way.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

It's that time of year again... classes start tomorrow and I'm not particularly excited about the prospect of grading, being graded, and being degraded. (Okay, maybe that last one is a bit dramatic, but I am *not* a drama queen. ::ahem::) Usually, the ill-effects of class going are mitigated, at least slightly, by going out to lunch. This has become a daily occurrence in the department, but it all seems a bit costly. My solution to this for this year (at least for the next week or so until I forget about it) is to make large batches of soup and take that to lunch.

The other day I tried making chicken tortellini soup with horrible tortellini. They were discarded before hitting the stock pot, but I was left with a lot of vegetables in broth. And then I discovered the jar of salsa in the fridge. Thus chicken fauxtilla soup was born.

3 chicken breasts baked and pulled
1 jar salsa (I used some smoked chipotle stuff. the kind in the small jar)
64ish oz chicken stock
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
3-4 celery stalks, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 ear's worth of corn kernels
1.5 c tortilla chips
1 Tbs olive oil
s+p

Saute onion, carrots, and celery and about a tsp of salt in olive oil until the veggies are softened. Add in corn and garlic and stir until fragrant (like 30 seconds). Add in chicken stock, salsa, chicken, and tortilla chips. Let simmer until the tortilla chips are "dissolved" and the soup gets a thicker consistency.

You can also add in herbs. I guess if I had been thinking ahead, I would have put in oregano. I also took the celery leaves from the heart and chopped them up and put them in the soup because it makes me feel thrifty.

Martha's Miso Soup

For my birthday this year, I received a bunch of cookbooks, but the most exciting one was Martha Stewart's Cooking School, not only for the food pornaliciousness, but also for the instructions from the domestic diva herself! I have, for the most part, been a self-taught cook, using the internet and books that I've purchased from the internet to try to figure it out. It works okay, but it has resulted in a somewhat lopsided resume, if you will. Enter Martha into my life. I haven't worked through too many of the lessons, but I have started on stocks. There's that vegetable stock that's still sitting in my freezer and there was dashi, a traditional Japanese fish and seaweed based stock, which is the base for miso soup.

More specifically, dashi is made from kombu, an edible kelp in the family of brown algae, and katsuobushi, the Japanese name for dried and smoked skipjack tuna. Katsuobushi is often referred to as bonito or bonito flakes and is rather pungent hence the lack of packing of the flakes.

Dashi
6 c cold water
3 6 in strips kombu
2 c bonito flakes, (not packed)

bring the water and the kombu to nearly a boil and then remove the kombu and take the pot off the heat. add the bonito flakes and allow them to steep until they settle on the bottom (this takes ~3-5 minutes). Strain. Ta da! you have dashi.

It's really that simple, although I had nothing good to use to strain it, so I ended up pouring it through coffee filters... which I'm never ever doing again because that was a royal pain in the behind. Next time I'm getting a fine mesh strainer.

Miso soup follows naturally from the dashi.

3.5 c + .5 c dashi
.25 c white miso paste
handful of wakame

heat the dashi in a saucepan and in a separate bowl, mix the half c of dashi with the miso paste until it's liquidy... add miso+dashi mixture to the saucepan and add in the reconstituted wakame (which is another type of edible seaweed). I suppose you could add in tofu and green onions, but i didn't have any on hand.

The soup turned out really well and the entire process was well worth it. I now have some leftover dashi, however. Though, I plan to use it as part of a dipping sauce for tempura vegetables... more on that when it happens. :)

Why Cayenne Pepper is Entertaining: A Memoir on Corn Chowder

Colby is funny, but more on that later. After perusing enough tastespotting, I've been itching to make some sort of soup. I found one recipe that seemed promising, mostly because it didn't require a stick blender.

Corn Chowder a la Julie
3 tbs butter
3 tbs olive oil
1 carrot, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 small tomato, deseeded and chopped
1/4 sweet onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 baking potato, cubed into 1 cm pieces
celery leaves, chopped
1 c chicken stock
4 ears corn
1 c cream
herbs
cayenne pepper
s+p

Melt O.O. and butter in a stock pot. Add in onions, celery, carrots, garlic, potato and s+p to taste. Let cook for ~10 minutes, until the onions turn translucent and everything begins to soften. Husk the corn. Take a large bowl and place the corn in the center, cutting parallel to the body in a swift, downward motion to take off the kernels. You'll probably have to flip it upside down because it'll probably be too hard to get all the way down. Once you're done, take the cob and run the back of your knife down where the kernels used to be and get all of the "corn juice" out. Take one of the cobs and divide it into thirds (I just did it by hand). Add in the corn, tomato, and chicken stock. Also, add the corn cob bits. Take this up to a boil and let cook for another 5-10 minutes. Add in the stock and then whatever herbs/spices you want. I used ~1 tsp of Old Bay, 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper, 1 tsp dried basil, 1 tsp dried parsley and let's say 2 tbs of celery leaves, chopped fine. Let it simmer for awhile until the flavors start to blend.

So about celery leaves: Colby and I were discussing whether or not to get celery. I decided to make the soup at about 10:30 PM last night (and by "last night", I mean 3.5 hours ago, but *technically* it was last night) standing in front of the produce section at H.E.B. the local friendly megamarket. I have always felt that celery smells wonderful, but tastes disappointing, since all of that wonderful scent is coming from the leaves. According to Rayray and Alton, celery is related to cilantro or parsley or something that's aromatic and herb-y so I took all the leaves from the celery bunch and treated it just like a fresh herb. I felt all thrifty and creative. Small victories. Anywho, it actually turned out wonderful. I'm guessing that as long as you have the celery leaves, s+p, and like cayenne pepper, the taste will still be wonderful.

So during the making of the soup, Colby started making a pork roast. We're apparently impulse cookers. How cute. He was in the kitchen and standing by the sink and I had just dumped the cayenne pepper into the soup and I wanted to clean off the spoon to use it to taste with, but I wasn't about to eat a mouthful of cayenne with the soup. While my back was turned, Colby put the spoon in his mouth, not really knowing what it was and then turned around to me and told me that "the stuff on the spoon" was hot. Tee hee.