Acorn squash soup

Making the best of leftovers.

It's really hard to take a decent picture of soup on a cellphone.

This is basically a different sort of what'cha'got soup. Normally, I'd throw it all into a minestrone sort of deal or maybe into a Gypsy Stew*, but today, I didn't have the right ingredients for either of those things, so I went for the Ally Method of what'cha'got soup making. I had 2 very old acorn squash, one fire-baked potato, one fire-roasted onion, some shallots, some garlic, some milk, some stock cubes, and a selection of spices and herbs**.

The method!
As usual in situations like this, I didn't measure anything, so you'll have to eyeball it.

Cut the acorn squash in half, clean out the seeds and the worst of the fibers, and microwave for about 6 or 8 minutes under damp paper towels until soft enough to scoop out.

While that's nuking, sautee your fire-roasted onions (previously cooked for about a half hour in in tinfoil in the embers of a fire pit), your shallot and your two or so cloves of garlic in a mix of olive oil and butter until everything is sweet and caramelized. The roasted onion gets a jump on that, but if you don't have one, you can caramelize from raw, it'll just take longer.

Put your stock cubes in hot water and make it into stock. I had one each of veggie, beef and chicken, and added five cups of boiling water (which is one cup less than the stock instructions called for, but that's how big by bowl was and it seems fine).

Scoop out all the meat from the squash and just drop it right into the onions. Don't burn yourself too much. Stir it all around and mash it up some with the spoon. Chop up the old baked potato with most of the skin taken off, and throw that in, too.

Add all the broth, stir it up real good, and mash it some more. I used a potato masher. Start seasoning. I have no idea how much I threw in, but it was about two rounds of the following: Fresh cracked black pepper, sea salt, thyme, a little saffron (this only went in once because it's expensive and I don't have much), cinnamon, nutmeg, five spice powder, sage, cayenne, bay leaf, . Old squash are apparently not as sweet as fresh, so I added some wildflower honey (local, of course, because I'm a honey snob). Cook it a lot.

While it's cooking, periodically mash it up more and stir it vigorously to get it all breaking down. Check on flavorings. It should be sweet and savory.

Mine started burning on the bottom of the pan, and that really just added to the roasty flavor and gave it a nice orangy-brown color, but I wouldn't let it burn too much.

Once everything starts looking like it's not going to mash up any more without help, you can blenderize it or use one of those motorboat blenders. Our blender was mouldy and we don't have a motorboat, so I ran the whole giant batch through a fine-mesh sieve***, which took way too long and used up, like, three mixing bowls, but came out with a nice texture.

Throw it all back into the pot, stir it until it's smooth and check on seasoning. Add about 2/3 to a whole cup of milk (less if you have cream) and some more butter, and heat it back up until the butter is totally melted.

Gobble it all up like woah. Perfect fall soup, and would likely work with almost any squash, or sweet potatoes, or root veggies. Ally frequently makes her's curried, and that would have been nice here, too, except I unaccountably couldn't find the curry powder, so I went for thanksgivingy seasonings instead.



*Gypsy Stew is defined by old room mates as anything you can beg, borrow or steal, thrown into a soup pot. In practice, it's usually chicken or veggie broth based, and almost always thickened with rice and beans, and usually eaten communally out of small cups with many servings.
**I think you can judge how much people like cooking and eating by how many spices they have. Our collection outgrew anything as simple as a spice rack and now resides in the entire knife drawer beside the stove. We have literally dozens of distinct herbs and spices, almost all bought individually for specific meals we've been making over the last few years, not as kits or anything like that.
***Someone should buy me a hand-powered food mill for Christmas. Or an immersion blender, but I kind of like the freedom of old-fashioned tools.

seasonality for wk 42: second week of october

Hello my lovelies! It's been ages, I know, but I've got a series of posts about the Epcot Food and Wine Fest that we went to last weekend that should make up for it. But now, Seasonality:

It's definitely getting Fall-ish here on the List. Citruses are slipping, and berries are all but gone, except for Rowan, Juniper and Elder, which are coming on. Persimmons, Pomegranates, Figs and Dates are all in season, so it's starting to feel pretty exotic around the produce aisles. Stone fruits are still around, but they're not so common on the lists, and will probably be gone soon, so make your peach jam while you can; I'm seeing if I can manage it in the super-tight budget. Squash and Zucchini are still around, but they're more likely to be the huge monsters that happen when you can't eat them as fast as they grow, and Winter Squash is moving in-- I think I'm going to try to make pumpkin butter this year, and when we carve the halloween pumpkins, I'm making more of the pumpkin broth we made from the scraps last year, because it was awesome with sage and thyme as a soup base.

What else? Herbs are still going strong, but the tenderer ones are giving way to the hardier ones like Sage and Rosemary. Nuts are coming in, and I couldn't be happier; alot of my protein comes from them anyway. I'm keeping an eye out for Chestnuts, and I wish I had the ability to grow the seeds here, so that I could have them all the time (in fall) for free. Meats are almost all in season now, and the hunting seasons are all on; I should see if there's somewhere around here where I can get rabbit or venison or something exotic to the city like that. Tomatoes are moving down the list, but will likely stay available here in Florida until, like, Christmas. Yay mild winters! Boo continued oppressive heat!

Scarburough Faire Fall Soup

This picture doesn't nearly look as good as it does in the bowl.

So C and I were cooking down the raw pumpkin scraps that were taking up too much space in the fridge to make pie, and realized we didn't have enough ingredients, so we decided to just drain it off and put it away till later. That left us with several cups of pumpkin juice after all the puree was squeezed like so much orange cheese. We were going to toss it, but C said 'I bet this'd make a nice base for soup'-- and buy did it ever!

Here's what we did:
In the soup pot, we sauteed an onion, a miscelaneous shallot and about six cloves of garlic in butter and oil with maybe a teaspoon of sugar and some salt until they carmelized all over the bottom of the pot.

We added one-ish carrot (it's the leftover other half of that giant carrot, that I'd chopped for a previous meal and then didn't need), and two stalks of celery, and sauteed that for a bit to get them softening a little.

In goes the pumpkin juice and an equal amount of chicken stock from the ever-present chicken boiling we do almost weekly.

Then a massive sweet potato, six redskin potatoes, one stalk of broccoli and it's stem, four or five sliced mushrooms, a handful of frozen veggie mix (the kind with greenbeans, limas, peas, corn and a little carrot). Seasoned it with more salt and alot alot alot of pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (hence the name!), and cooked it until the potatoes were soft; every thing else was done just before, and had reached that perfect level of soup-softness.

It thickened up some as the potatoes cooked, and all the spooning broke up the sweet potatoes and thickened it a little more. It came out just a little sweet, a little roasty (I'm assuming from the carmelizing), and the first sip reminded me of a corn chowder but lighter as there's no cream at all. After that, it was a nice balance of salt and sweet and peppery and herbal, and the veggies were all perfect.

This one's definitely a keeper.

Pumpkin Cheesecake Icecream

by Ben & Jerry's
There was only one little tub left last night when we went grocery shopping, and I grabbed it without a second thought. I had it for breakfast like all good single post-college girls do, and it was pretty amazing. Thick and creamy like I've come to expect from Ben & Jerry's, smooth and perfectly balanced-- it tastes like pumpkin without tasting like a vegetable, it tastes like nutmeg without tasting like only nutmeg, it tastes like cheesecake without tasting like cream cheese like so many icecreams with that word in the title do. The gramcracker swirl is sweet and crispy, and I'm still amazed at how well Ben & Jerry's uses black magic to keep their pastry-type swirls from getting soggy.

It's limited edition, as all seasonal things must be, but it's a good one. It'll go down next to the Festivus Icecream in the History of Food I've Loved.

Super-Veg Gratin

No pictures again, because it didn't last that long. I take it as a compliment, and as a need to take pictures before I tell people it's ready.

Anyway, here's what I did:

Butter a 13 x 9 in baking dish. Use a piece of bread and tear the buttered remains up to make breadcrumbs; mix it with five crumbled saltines.

Slice up four potatoes very thin-- if you have a mandolin or one of those box graters that can do narrow slices, definitely do that; I only have a moderately sharp knife, and that takes forever and left me with a blister where the edge of the handle hits my first finger. Keep the slices in water until you're ready so they won't go gross.

Slice up carrots the same way. I used one of those monster carrots, and it equaled about two or three good sized normal carrots.

Finely chop 1 red pepper, 1 stalk of celery and it's leaves, 1 onion, and 4 cloves of garlic.

Grate 1/3 of a block of sharp cheddar and mix it with an equal amount of parmesan-- shaky-cheese is fine.

Open a carton of potato-leek soup and one of veggie broth.

Heat the oven to 450 or 475 (mine runs cold, so I did 475).

Get layering! Like so:
- Layer of potatoes topped with salt and pepper
- Layer of carrots
- Layer of mixed veg and garlic
- Layer of cheese, topped with salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary
- Repeat. Mine repeated another whole time, and then a third layer of potatoes to cover the top.
- Mix half the broth with all the potato-leek soup and pour it over the layered veg.
- Top with the bread and more salt, pepper, thyme and rosemary. Butter if you want.

Cover with foil and cook on a cookie sheet to catch drippings for 45 to 50 minutes. Remove the foil and cook until the veggies are all uniformly soft. Let it sit for ten minutes until it stops boiling and sets up a little, then dig in! Even when lava-hot, it's really yummy and has a texture something like the inside of a pot pie.

First Pomagranate of the Season

picture by my good friend Rachel, featuring the hands of my other good friend Jaqui.

Usually I don't get the year's first poemgranate until winter-- somewhere near Christmas when they show up at Wal-Mart and other such cheap and publicly-accessible stores. But because of the Farmer's Market mentioned before, I got to have a wedge of a lovely shiny-red pom for breakfast. They're messy to open and kind of a pain to eat if you don't chomp the seeds (which I don't because I think they're too hard to chomp and bitter and clash with the tenderness of the fruit, as well as leaving nothing for me to plant), but they're so tasty and so... what's the word I'm looking for here? Histoical? Loaded with centuries? It's the sense that they've been around for almost as long as people have, the knowledge that they were common in the first civilizations man inhabited, the idea that they're sacred to Goddesses in the old stories that tell of the turning of the seasons...

I think not in straight lines but in clouds of ideas and references, and pomegranates, perfect and shiny and so loaded with little rubies, are more surrounded by ideas then most things, and the first one I get to eat of the year is like a sacrament-- it's absorbing the fall that fell when Persephony went underground and ate the same seeds as me, it's remembering all the times we sat around campfires eating poms and drinking tea brewed on an open flame, it's hoping the spring will come and it's enjoying the coming winter. I'm early this year, but it's still the same, and it's still wonderful, and I love them.

As soon as these seeds are dry enough not to rot, I'm trying again to sprout viable seedlings so I can still have poms when the food system collapses entirely.

St Augustine Pier Farmer's Market

Wednesday mornings are for the Farmer's Market. I don't get to go as much as I'd like because it's far enough from my house that I can't bike, but we're hoping to change that in the future. With food costing more all the time and us not getting any less poor, the market lets us get super-fresh veggies for way cheaper then we can at the supermarket.
Here's what thirteen and a half dollars gets you in the second-ish week of October: 3 huge red sweet peppers (2$ for one at Publix last I looked), an eggplant big as my face, three big vine-ripened tomatoes, two giant yams, two equally giant carrots, a pomegranate and a really fantastic-smelling apple, and a stalk of fresh lemongrass (which is sitting in water and I'm hoping will grow roots for me). And a mollasses cookie I already ate. Everything was huge. I mean, look at this carrot! --->


We're going vegetarian tonight because we're out of meat, but with veg like this, who needs meat?

In addition to this, H got three huge portebellos, a pound of green beans, three cloves of garlic, a shallot, a massive 1$ stalk of celery, sweet potato bread and a cookie, and C got an avocado as big as a grapefruit, three yellow tomatoes, a pound of grapes, a pint of strawberries, two pounds of apples, a pomagranate, a loaf of rye bread, sweetpotato bread, and another cookie, and neither spend more than 20$. We're eating well for the next few days.

Variation on Mom's Stew

My mom makes a great slivered beef stew. It's on old recipe from the cookbook her mom gave her when she married my dad, and it was old then, so I'm guessing it's a 50s housewife sort of recipe. I was craving it last night, but all we had was chicken, so I used that.

Slice the chicken into narrow strips*. Dredge about half of them in flour.

Brown them in olive oil or butter in the soup pot so all the flavor stays in one place; remove them to clear way for the veggies. They don't have to be cooked through because they'll finish in the soup, but make sure they're browned. The flour will come off, and that's fine; it helps to thicken the soup into a stew later.

Add a little more oil and cook the onions (one or two, roughly chopped) while you chop the veggies: three or four potatoes; two carrots or a handful of baby carrots; a handful of broccoli; a green pepper; a handful of fresh mushrooms.**

Throw all the veggies in when the onions have started to caramelize. Throw the chicken and their juices back in.

Add chicken broth. I used more of the leftover broth from last week, about 20 oz, and topped it off with water-- the pot should be about three quarters full, a goodly portion of stew. Add in a few bay leaves (I usually do one for each person eating it) and more salt and pepper.

Boil it for 20 to 30 minutes, or until the hard veggies are all soft enough that you need a spoon to eat them. If it doesn't thicken up on it's own, make a slurry of flour and cornstarch and the hot broth, and make sure it's smooth before you add it back to the pot so it doesn't make a clumpy stew. Cook a bit longer to give it a chance to thicken, then serve with biscuits.

What're the chances of me not using garlic? I know, it's crazy, but my mom was never much of a garlic-cooker, being nowhere near Italian, and this is her recipe, so no garlic. It makes a savory, lovely stew that's good for several days.



* This would also be good with bone-in chicken or turkey. Just cook them longer.
** Peas would be good here. Maybe beans. Really, just use whatever veggies you have. It's a fall and winter recipe, so it does best with sturdy, stewable veggies-- tubers, roots, cabbage, broccolis, that sort of thing-- but any will do. If you use a lot of softer ones, cook for less time, or pre-cook the hard ones a bit before adding so the soft ones dont' become mush.

Apple-Onion Chicken with Mashed Potatoes

Yeah, I really need a new camera. Anyone got a hundred-ish dollars I can have?

Anyway!
Today, a nice fall offering of chicken stewed with apples and onions, done thusly:

Put potatoes on to boil.
Put onions and a peeled, chopped apple or two, and a chunk of slivered cabbage on medium heat and cook up with some olive oil.
Add the chunked chicken-- this was two large breasts, somewhere around two pounds.
Add a half cup of apple sauce and a half cup of apple butter, salt and pepper, a little butter, and some red wine vinegar.
Stew it all until it's cooked way down and the chicken is cooked all the way through. It'll be something like a chunky applesauce, and never really thickens up into a gravy, and should be tart and sweet and spicy.
Serve with the mashed potatoes.

We've made this all together in a crockpot with a pork shoulder, and it's lovely that way, too.

Acorn Flour!

I found this post about making acorn flour. We've got billions o' acorns up in this block-and-a-half street I live on, as I discovered when I gathered a bunch for crafting last year, and I think I'd love to give this a try. Mostly because of the following:
a) acorns are so pretty-- the shape of them is something that speaks to my hobbity soul, and the color of these inside is like saffron (i wonder if it'll stay yellow?)
b) people who lived here before Europeans lived off the things, and so can I
c) it's this huge resource that isn't getting used. I mean, this is an Arbor Day Tree City, and most of those trees are oaks.

I'll keep you posted, yeah?

Semi-Putanesca

Semi because i sort of made it up as I went. It's a fall-time sort of pasta made of all the random bits we had laying around before we went grocery shopping. So without further ado:

Start with onions.
I had one left, a yellow from a batch that was remarkably hot and oniony, so, knowing that I'd be making most of it from olives, I decided to caramelize the onions, and did so in olive oil over medium heat while I chopped up the rest. If I'd had fresh garlic, it would have gone in here, too.

About a cup of mixed olives, seeded and chopped.
I don't use canned olives any more-- I mean, if even Winn-Dixie has an olive bar, why not get real olives? These were a mix of Garlic-Stuffed and Lemon-Stuffed green olives and oil-cured Kalamatas. Minced them up real small and dropped them in as soon as the onions were sweet and browning.

Sliced mushrooms and white beans.
I used about five or six good button mushrooms, and tossed them in with a drained can of cannellini beans.

Seasoning.
Salt, just a little. Pepper, alot. Oregano, Basil, Rosemary, Thyme, Parsley, Garlic Powder, all dried. Fresh Sage and Basil from the garden (mostly sage, the basil's almost done, but the sage is going crazy now that it's cooler and dryer).

Tomatoes.
I used a can of Basil, Oregano and Garlic chopped tomatoes, half-drained because I didn't want it soupy. I think I might use the fire-roasted ones next time, if we have them. With fresh ones, it'd be more spring-ish.

Simmer.
Basically, just to let all the dried herbs soften up and to bring all the flavors together, as well as to cook it down a bit.

Cheese.
Our last nub of parmesan, about a half ounce or an ounce, grated and mixed in right at the end.

Serve.
Dropped on top of some whole-wheat spinach pasta.

Fed all five of us, though there were no seconds and the portions weren't huge; I was expecting three or four to be home. Ah well.

Yum!

Swedish Meatballs

C bought beef for the first time in months, and I wanted to do something special with it, so I made Swedish Meatballs. Mmmm, food meant for much cooler climates...

This was roughly two pounds of beef. To be entirely authentic, it should be half beef and half pork or veal, but all we had was beef and it wasn't planned, so I went with that.

Start by setting several pounds of potatoes to boil. We used red potatoes because we all like the skins. While they're cooking, make the meatballs.

To make the meatballs:
thawed raw ground beef
+/- 2 slices of bread, soaked in milk until really squishy, or a 1/2 c to a cup of bread crumbs, also soaked in milk until squishy-- about an equal portion of bread and milk
1 or 2 eggs
salt and pepper
mustard powder, allspice and nutmeg, about 1 tablespoon, 1 tbsp, 1/2 tbsp, more if you like them strongly seasoned
1 finely chopped onion, and it can be cooked ahead of time, but is just as tasty mixed in raw

Mix it all up. A fork or spoon will get it started, but to really make it uniform, take off all your rings and dive in with your hands. Gross, but faster and makes a much smoother and better mixed base, and you need to use your hands to make the meatballs anyway.

Ball them up into smallish meatballs-- about and inch and a half across. Go ahead and ball all of them up on a plate before starting to cook them.

Fry them in butter until cooked through. I usually plop them down and drop a lid over them so they start to cook on the top while the bottom is cooking, and so the moisture stays in. There'll usually be one that sort of falls apart-- sacrifice it to the flavor gods and make sure it's cooked through. This batch cooked in three installments, but I have a pretty big frypan.

Remove them to a paper-towel-covered plate to sit while the rest are finished. You may need to remove fallen onions from the pan between batches; put them aside and you can throw them back in when you make the sauce.

To make the sauce:
Once all the meatballs are done, add a tablespoon or so more butter and a few tablespoons of flour, and make a nice roux-- that sounds scary, but really you're just sucking up all the leftover meat-flavored grease with the flour. Cook it until it's just a little brown, sort of tannish. Then deglaze with beef broth or any other broth you have. I used veggie, which makes a lighter flavor sauce, but is still tasty.

Season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens up into a gravy-like consistency. You can stop here, or, if it's tasting too bland, you can add a half-cup of sour cream and some mustard powder. (I actually added too much mustard, but it's still tasty, just... mustardy).

Make your mashed potatoes as you normally would, and serve meatballs and taters with the sauce, and add a dollop of lingonberry jam or cranberry sauce if you have it.

This made enough for all five of us to eat six meatballs and a huge heaping of potatoes apiece.