Butternut Squash Soup

The produce box decided to bring me a butternut squash the other week. I was delighted and intimidated and decided that the best way to put it to use was something that wouldn’t rely on my knife skills to succeed. It was another perfect victim for soup season.

• Step one: dispatch the squash. I cut off the ends, cut it in half across the middle and used the potato peeler to peel it. Then I split each section, removed the seeds, and roughly chopped the whole thing into reasonable-sized bits.
• Next, dice an onion, sauté in olive oil, sprinkle with salt.
• Once the onion starts to get soft, add two cloves of garlic. When the garlic starts to get aromatic, add a good splash (maybe more of a pour) of white wine. Let that reduce a bit.
• At this point switch to your slow cooker (or slow cooker mode if you have an all-in-one).
• Add the chopped/peeled butternut squash and four cups of liquid. Go do something else for a few hours.
• For a while it will smell like you are making chicken soup (if you use chicken stock). Don’t panic, just ignore it until you begin to smell the squash. Then go check it and if the squash is tender it’s time to blitz it with the immersion blender (or transfer to the blender).
• Once you have a fairly smooth puree, check your seasoning. We decided that we needed to add a good blast of Cayenne pepper, some black pepper, and more salt.

My serving suggestion for this is to add a nice dollop of sour cream and a generous sprinkle of chopped parsley/scallions.

Split Pea Soup

This is Mr. Man’s specialty. He bought a five-pound bag of split peas off of the internet almost as soon as we got the fancy slow cooker. The only reason that he doesn’t make split pea soup all the time is that we don’t tend to have smoked ham hock sitting around all the time.

There really aren’t steps for this one. Mr. Man doesn’t bother with sautéing the onion, celery, and carrots, he just throws them right in the pot with the split peas, ham hock, and liquid. He does chop the onions and celery rather fine; they seem to disappear into the split peas, leaving just big chunks of carrots and hopefully little bits of smoked ham.

He recommends starting the slow cooker on high until everything gets going, the split peas start to soften and you smell the smoky ham hock. Then switch to low and let it go a while longer.

Before serving, he will pull out the ham hock and use a fork to pull the meat off the bone. If it doesn’t look particularly delicious, skip this step and just throw it out. You can always dice some breakfast ham or even sandwich ham if you want.

Soup season is a fun time to make something delicious with whatever you happen to have on hand. I hope I have inspired you to undertake a bit of careless cookery.

The post Soup Season, Part 2 appeared first on Cynthia Gellis.

First up was scones.  I had never made scones before (they seemed complicated for some reason), but I discovered a Martha Stewart recipe that seemed pretty straightforward and I was feeling ready to try it.  The recipe called for some sort of dried fruit (cranberries!) that I didn’t have, but I did have just a bit of candied ginger in the cupboard that seemed ready to meet its destiny.

I discovered the great things about making scones: 1) you don’t wind up with a huge batch of something (at least not with this recipe); and 2) there isn’t a bunch of rolling out, cookie cutter nonsense, you just flatten the dough into a round-ish blob and cut it into wedges.

I’m going to guess that the thing that makes scones so scrumptious is that they are made with half-and-half. Probably most important is brushing the tops with half-and-half and sprinkling them with sugar before baking.

After I had munched a warm scone (or two), I was ready to move on to something a bit more savory.  Of course, cold and rainy day kitchen adventures wouldn’t be complete without soup!

Mr. Man had made chicken tacos the night before and there was enough leftover chicken for a week’s worth of tacos. Or … chicken tortilla soup!

For the soup, I strictly adhered to the just throw a bunch of stuff in the crockpot and let it cook for as long as possible technique.

First, I chopped an onion, some celery, and carrots.  Those went in the crockpot with the box of chicken broth and can of diced green chilis.

After a couple of hours, I went to check on my veggies and started to get nervous.  I started to question why I wouldn’t have sautéed them up in a pan before throwing them in the crockpot?  What was I going to do now?  Those onions did not look like they were anywhere near melting into the broth the way that I wanted them to.  Oh well, at least I had another solid 5-6 hours for this to hang out in the crockpot.  Better keep it on high. 

I did go ahead and throw the chicken in at this point as if the pre-cooked chicken would set an example for the vegetables of what they should inspire to be. Because the chicken was already very seasoned, I didn’t really worry about adding any spices.

A few hours later I checked on it again.  Maybe it was starting to try to come together?  The carrots weren’t crunchy anymore so that must be progress.  At this point I tore up about six corn tortillas and added them to the crock to dissolve.

I just love the way that a few corn tortillas can add so much body to a really simple soup. They not only thicken the broth but add a dimension of flavor and subtle sweetness. Its one of those great uses for stale bread kind of kitchen tricks.

After all day, we had soup!  I served it with some homemade taco chips (oven-baked of course) a sprinkle of cheese, a bit of diced avocado, and a squeeze of fresh lime juice.  Mr. Man approved.

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