Squash and apple soup

Here are a couple of soups that pair apple and squash together for good effect.

Squash and apple soup
Adapted from County Home Holidays at Home 1994 special magazine

Ingredients
1 cup chopped onion
2 small carrots, peeled and sliced thinly

3 ½ cups apple cider or juice

2 teaspoons instant chicken bouillon granules

2 teaspoons lemon juice

½ teaspoon ground ginger

¼ teaspoon white pepper

4 cups mashed cooked squash, or two 16-ounce cans of pumpkin

2 cups half and half, or a mix of light cream and milk

Method

Cook onions and carrots in cider in a large saucepan, covered, until vegetables are very tender, about 30 minutes. Add bouillon, lemon juice, ginger and pepper. Remove from heat and cool slightly.

Pour mixture into a blender and whir to combine. Add squash and puree mixture. (This makes one very full blender, or you’ll need to do it in batches in your standard-size food processor.)

Pour pureed mixture back into the saucepan. Whisk in half and half and heat through. Season to taste with salt and more white pepper. Serves 8.

Rating: This makes a very thick, slightly sweet soup, particularly if you use the pumpkin. It's a good recipe for post-holidays, when you're likely to have random bits of cream and cider leftover that you had on hand for guests who just drank red wine anyway. 

Note: To roast butternut squash, preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment. Cut the squash in half lengthwise. Remove seeds. Do not peel the squash at this point. Brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place cut side down on baking sheet. Roast 40 to 50 minutes until tender. Scoop out the flesh from the peel and mash.

Butternut squash and apple bisque
I found this recipe from the Midtown Farmers Market site a few years back. Not sure where they got it, but this Relish recipe looks like a possible source.

Ingredients
2 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup chopped leeks (from the white part)
3 cups chopped tart apple (I used Granny Smiths)
3 cups peeled and chopped butternut squash
1 cup peeled and chopped russet potatoes
1/3 cup dry sherry
3 cups broth
1 cup orange juice
1 tablespoon honey
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon nutmeg
1½ tablespoon curry powder
1¼ cups half and half
3/4 cups crumbled blue cheese

Method
In large saucepan, melt butter. Saute leeks about 5 minutes. Add apple, cooking until it begins to soften. Add squash, potatoes, sherry and broth. Bring to a simmer and let cook, covered, until vegetables are tender, at least a half hour. Add orange juice, honey, salt, nutmeg, curry and pepper to taste.

Cool slightly. Transfer to a blender or food processor and puree. Return to pan and add half a half. Heat through over low heat. Place in bowls and top with crumbled cheese.

Rating: Very tasty and repeatable. 

 

Roasted pear delicata squash soup

So many squash, so little time.

Each year I reach a juggling point to manage competing food/storage demands. On the one hand I need to use up all the refrigerated goods I got from the farmers market (leeks, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, and inexplicably, turnips) before they go bad and so I can free up space for holiday foods. Ditto with the last arugula, kale and cabbage harvested from the garden, and the Vietnamese cilantro plant brought in under the grow lights starts to take a dive when the basement thermometer does.

Meanwhile there are all those onions, sweet/regular potatoes and squash on an orchard rack in the basement. I know full well that by January, the squash viability days are numbered, and squash squandering is unacceptable.

But at the same time, there were zillions of holiday baked goods to be made and stored in the same freezer space that soups would occupy ...

Somewhere in all this madness, I return to these tried-and-true soup recipes to help power through the squash. The turnips are on their own.

Roasted pear and delicata squash soup

Adapted from the Pear Bureau Northwest, www.usapears.org

Ingredients

2 pounds delicata squash (or butternut), halved lengthwise and seeded

2 pears, halved lengthwise and cored

Olive oil

4 cups broth, divided

½ cup whipping cream

1 tablespoon sugar

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Drizzle squash and pears with olive oil. Place cut side down on a rimmed baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes until tender.

When cool enough to handle, scrape flesh out of pears and squash and put in a food processor or blender, discarding skins. Puree until smooth. Add a cup of broth and puree. Pour into a saucepan and add remaining broth, cream, sugar and nutmeg. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Adjust seasoning to taste with salt and pepper.

Serves 6.

Rating: This is possibly my favorite squash soup. It’s not as hearty as some of the other, thicker soups, but it’s got the more delicate, pleasing flavor. Makes a good first course soup, and definitely could work as a company dish with a decorative swirl of cream on top.

Expect a few more squash soup recipes this week.

Another squash soup recipe that's coming out to play this month:

Slow cooker squash soup 
I've blogged about this one here:

 

Broccoli salad with peanut butter dressing and baked tofu

This is week one of an attempt to make better lunches. By better, I mean more satisfying than my default meal of yogurt, carrots and fruit. That works fine enough in summer, but it doesn't seem to cut it in the nasty months of the year, when winter seems endless. And then I wind up hitting the vending machine, which is still not satisfying, or good for me.

So the plan is to spend a bit more time on the weekend prepping some choices for the week. I figured I'd start with some of the options from this Kitchn post, which breaks things down into bases, toppings and dressings that you can toss together each day so you don't have a soggy lunch that makes you go to the vending machine.

I thought I’d give another tofu recipe a try, just in case it’s somehow gotten better.

Tofu and broccoli salad with peanut butter dressing

Adapted from Kitchn.com

The base: 1 bag broccoli slaw mix mixed with 1 red pepper, cut into julienne strips

The toppings: Peanuts, chopped cilantro, baked tofu (made from this Kitchn method, by first marinating chunks of tofu in a mixture of 1 tablespoon each of rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, soy sauce and water for up to overnight and then baking it for 20 minutes or more at 350 degrees. (Longer baking time equals chewier tofu.)

The dressing: ½ cup smooth peanut butter, ¼ cup rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons soy sauce, 2 tablespoons water, 1 to 2 teaspoons Sriracha, 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil. The original recipe calls for this being whisked together. I can’t imagine how the recipe authors managed this, unless they are co-op shoppers who only can imagine fancy peanut butter from the produce area instead of the stuff in the tub in the canned good aisles from Target. I broke down and used a food processor. It still winds up being a bit of a sludge, but that way it’s a mixed sludge instead of brown liquid with a big ball of peanut butter in it.

The drill: Store the base mixture separately, then top as desired when you're ready to assemble your lunch. No need to transport the dressing separately; you can put glops of the dressing on top and it’s so thick it won’t make the sturdy cabbage soggy.

Rating: The dressing is tasty, even if it looks a tad unappetizing before it’s mixed in. Reasonably filling, since the cabbage provides plenty of bulk and crunch, and the thick dressing with peanut butter adds to the heft factor. If I were to make it again, I might try adding more liquid to make the dressing more dressing-like. The tofu? Well, that treatment makes it more edible than I remember, since the marinade gives it some flavor (and no doubt more calories/sodium as well).

At any rate, no vending machine trips this past week, so yay me.

 

A popover to end all popovers.

 

I was very lucky and got to have lunch close to the 400-year-old fireplace (relocated from an English manor) on the last day the Oak Grill was open. Now we know it's really not Dayton's anymore ... It was fun while it lasted.

Cranberry, gorgonzola, bacon rosemary tart

Cranberry sauce, bacon, gorgonzola puff pastry pizza
Adapted from bakerbynature.com. It's worth visiting to see the pretty triangle shapes she cut the tart into.

Ingredients
1 sheet puff pastry
Olive oil
3 slices bacon
2/3 cup cranberry sauce
4 ounces gorgonzola
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves

Method
Thaw puff  pastry in refrigerator for several hours or for up to 45 minutes at room temperature. (Check after a half hour of room temperature thawing; well thawed puff pastry is a pain to work with so better to start manipulating it when it's barely thawed.)

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a Silpat liner. Roll pastry lightly to smooth out folds. Cut in half. Place on baking sheet. Brush each half with olive oil, leaving a ½-inch border. 

Preheat oven to 425. Cook bacon until it's mostly cooked. Drain and slice into 3/8-inch strips.

Put about 5 tablespoons of cranberry sauce on each pastry sheet, leaving the same border. (If your sauce is runnier, you might want less.) Sprinkle half of cheese on each sheet. Top with bacon slices and red onion.

Bake for 18-20 minutes until puffed and golden. Remove from oven and garnish with rosemary. Slice into desired shapes and serve.

Rating: Very simple, tasty combination and a great way to finish off this holiday cranberry sauce.

Even canned orange gourds have Pinterest pages

The other day I noticed that cans of pumpkin tout their Pinterest page. I get that it’s potentially useful marketing for the company and useful for consumers to find ways to use up extra cans of pumpkin once we’re past the traditional pumpkin pie season.

But still, it gives me pause. This same can still has the same recipe that my mother always used to make her annual pumpkin pies, which is comforting. But where Mom just got the one bit of information from the can she needed, we’re now led into a bold new world of choices. And in typical Pinterest fashion, not a few choices, but an overwhelming array of recipes in categories like Power Drinks and Game Time Snacks. Um, really?

How is this bad? I guess it isn’t, technically. But in my mother’s day, the only aspirational guilt inputs were from a handful of what were then called women’s magazines, extension service pamphlets and other club ladies. A whole wide world of choices wasn’t available to her, but she had fewer possibilities to weigh on her mind. Potential and opportunity trade both ways.

Don’t get me wrong. I love me some Pinterest, which essentially lets me have highly organized visual bookmarks and waste lots of time that I used to spend looking at catalogs. You know, the I’m too tired to do anything stage where all I can do is look at pictures.

Meanwhile, the Barnes & Noble is closing downtown. How are these two related? Well, in a world where you can get a staggering array of recipes online from sites far fancier and more useful than this one, do people buy as many cookbooks anymore? (And if they do, they now all have to look like bound versions of blog sites with way more photos than you need showing you how to drizzle olive oil, again.)

Obviously there are other factors at work here, like lease negotiations, but certainly book stores face competition not just from Internet booksellers, but from the information available on the Internet itself. Yes, some people still buy travel guidebooks, but maps? Not so much when Google Now or Siri can talk you through turn by turn. Some commenter on the store closing article blamed people getting e-books at the library. Since e-books are likely to cut into sales of hard copies, regardless of where they are obtained, I’m not sure how libraries are at fault, but whatever. (Actually, I’ve purchased several cookbooks after first checking them out of the library to make sure they cooked as good as they looked.)

All I know is that while spending my lunch hours browsing through cookbooks at Barnes & Noble, I didn’t feel overwhelmed. I just wished I could buy more of them. But instead, books force you to make a selection, to commit to just one thing. Kind of the anti-Internet. And that wasn’t so bad.

That said, Pumpkin Maple Bacon Spread from the fine folks at Libby’s, anyone? It's now pinned on my Apps I'm apt to make board.

Rant mode off.

Roashed squash crostini with roasted garlic goat cheese

Definitely time to make progress on all those butternut squash I bought at last year's farmers market. January is edging into use or lose time. Luckily, I can figure out how to use squash in nearly any course, even appetizers like these.

Roasted squash, arugula and roasted garlic goat cheese tartine
Adapted from abeautifulplate.com (She made hers an open-face sandwich, which is also a lovely idea, but I had a mini baguette on hand and decided to go the appetizer route.)

Ingredients
1 head of garlic, roasted

½ of a medium butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into 1-inch cubes
olive oil for drizzling
4-ounce package of goat cheese, at room temperature
1½ cups arugula
1 tablespoon olive oil

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
1 mini baguette (or half a long one), slice about 3/8-inch thick

Method

Preheat oven to 425. Toss squash cubes with some good olive oil, coarse salt and pepper. Spread on a rimmed baking sheet and roast for about 30 minutes until tender and starting to turn color.

Meanwhile, puree goat cheese and roasted garlic together in a food processor, adding a touch of any leftover oil from roasting the garlic, and a tiny pinch of coarse salt.

After squash is cooked, remove pan from oven. Lower heat to 350. Place bread slices on a baking sheet and bake until crisped, about 5 minutes.

Spread goat cheese-garlic mixture on bread. Pause to consider that at this stage, it's already an amazingly tasty app. Then go ahead, gild the lily by piling on some of the roasted squash cubes on each slice.

Toss arugula, olive oil and vinegar in a bowl. Place some arugula on top of the squash. The original recipe called for a sprinkle of Maldon salt on top, which I'm sure would be very pretty, but any sea salt will do flavorwise.

Rating: This is a very tasty appetizer, and one I'd happily make again. (That goat cheese-garlic mixture is to die for.) Just know that it's best served as a sit-down at the table app where you have ready access to napkins, because your fingers will get messy and you really can't just lick it all off when there are guests present.