Tag Archives: soup

Rain, Soup, and Someone

home, love, poetry, ,

Thanks to Maria, I found a poem that captures a little of how sweet it is to have rain splashing against windows — that is, if you have no lack of life’s other little or huge blessings, like a Beloved Someone for whom you can warm up a bowl of soup, as I did this evening for mine. I am the Empress.

THE EMPEROR

She sends me a text
she’s coming home
the train emerges
from underground

I light the fire under
the pot, I pour her
a glass of wine
I fold a napkin under
a little fork

the wind blows the rain
into the windows
the emperor himself
is not this happy

~ Matthew Rohrer

A gift becomes a bisque

food and cooking, other gardens,

Two weeks ago I was given a hunk of very orange volunteer squash by the nuns at the monastery. After I baked it in the oven I wanted to eat it all just plain, because it tasted that good, and as sweet as candy.

But I had in mind to make soup using the same recipe that Kate (new nickname for my youngest) had found at Epicurious and cooked for us when she was home for Christmas. We collaborated on the soup, actually, and I’ll post here how we made it, not quite as the recipe instructed.

For example, the recipe told us to take two 2# butternut squashes, bake them, measure out the flesh and use three cups of it, then “reserve any remaining squash for another use.” If I did that sort of thing the remaining squash would get moldy in the fridge or sit in the freezer for a year or two and dry out. So we used all our squash (when Kate made it we used the true Butternuts from my garden, and they don’t come in even pound weights, by the way) and increased some other ingredients proportionally.

Curried Orange Squash Bisque

3-4# orange winter squash
olive oil
2-4 tablespoons butter
1 onion, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
1 peeled apple, chopped
2-3 teaspoons Thai red curry paste (ours was Thai Kitchen)
about a quart chicken broth
2 bay leaves (optional)
1/4 to 1/2 cup whipping cream
1 tablespoon honey (or more if your squash isn’t sweet)
1/2 cup or more sour cream, stirred smooth
chopped fresh cilantro
salt and pepper to taste

Brush or spray the cut side of the squash with olive oil and place cut side down on a baking sheet. Bake at 375° for about an hour or until tender. Scoop out the squash and measure it if you care to know how much you ended up with.

Melt the butter in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion, carrots and apple. Sauté 5 minutes. Add curry paste; stir 2 minutes. Add broth, bay leaves and squash. I used the bay leaves but Kate didn’t, and I liked her soup better, though I don’t know if it had anything to do with the bay. Maybe it was the variety of apple, or some other slight difference in our preparation.

You have to accept this degree of inconsistency when you cook — well, I do.  If it’s not the amounts of ingredients that affects the finished product, it’s the differences between one squash and another, or the change from 1/4 to 1/3 teaspoon of pepper that wasn’t measured. We are aiming for a hearty pot of soup, and not to become epicureans, even if we do like to search that website.

Bring the soup to a boil; reduce heat to medium and simmer uncovered 1 hour. Now, we couldn’t figure out any reason to cook it for an hour unless it was to get the flavor of bay into it, and when Kate made it we didn’t have time for that. You really only need to cook it until the vegetables are tender.

Discard the bay leaves, and purée the soup in batches in the blender or food processor. Return to the pot, stir in cream and honey and sour cream. Season with salt and pepper. Rewarm over medium-high heat. Divide among bowls and sprinkle with cilantro.

I forgot to take a picture with the cilantro on top….

I just now noticed that the sour cream was for drizzling over the top of the soup after it is already in the bowls. That would be pretty! But we mixed ours into the soup, and it was very tasty. The sour cream and curry gave the bisque just the right amount of zip, though I suspect that some brands of the curry would add more heat than Thai Kitchen did. If you want something spicy you’ll need to add more curry paste.

Even my husband, who despises squash, liked this soup!

Psalter and Soup

books, church, food and cooking, , , , , ,

This Advent season I’m participating with other women, organized by Sylvia, in reading the Psalter every day for the 40 days. Our Psalter is divided into 20 groupings each of which is called a kathisma, and every woman will read one per day.

There are more than 40 of us participating so that the whole book of Psalms will be read twice a day. Everyone who perseveres will end up having read the Psalter through twice before Christmas, as well! What a joy it has already been.

I’m also trying to read The Winter Pascha by Fr Thomas Hopko, which has 40 readings about this period in the church year that has similarities to Lent and Pascha. I read two days’ entries and now can’t find the book, so we’ll see how that goes….

We just got a good rain and everything is washed clean, the sky is blue, and the snowball bush is showing its glory.

It’s the season for soup! It’s easy to make a lenten meal in the soup kettle, and today I am putting in three kinds of beans and some winter vegetables.

I don’t often buy parsnips or turnips. When I used to read Down, Down the Mountain by Ellis Credle to my children, the vegetables the characters are so fond of must have seemed as exotic as boys and girls riding barefoot for lack of shoes to wear.

In the story, the mountain children carry a bagful of turnips down to the town, turnips they themselves planted and tended lovingly, in hopes of selling them for enough money to buy shoes. But everyone they meet along the way is hungering and thirsting for just such a delicacy, and when they arrive in town they discover that only one turnip is left in the bag.
 I’m afraid that after my first 15 years of family cooking, with its centerpieces of lentil soup and bread, I might have inadvertently started cultivating a taste in my family for fancier food. Fast periods are a good opportunity to repent and reform.
 But this plain food tastes pretty fancy after all.

Cherry Tomato Soup

food and cooking, my garden,


Mr. Glad and I have been eating bowls and bowls of cherry tomato salad, but are inundated with many more of the tiny love apples than we can consume fresh.

So I was quite pleased to read that another blogger had made soup from hers. Well, of course! I make soup from everything, so I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that myself.

 

 

I got right to work and sautéed one onion and several large cloves of garlic in about 1/4 cup of olive oil.

Then I added to the 6-quart pot this many tomatoes…hmm…would that be about 4 quarts? I cut the long, larger tomatoes in two. Chopped up a few sprigs of basil, added about a teaspoon of salt and a few grindings of black pepper.

Cooked it all very slowly with the lid on, and after 20 minutes my soup looked like this.
I thought it would be nice if it were mostly creamy, with a few chunks, so I transferred about two cupfuls to a bowl, and then puréed the rest in the blender and added it to the bowl as well.


My batch made nearly 3 quarts, I think. My original plan was that it would be a soup base, but I tasted it, and it is perfect the way it is! Very sweet and lots of tomato flavor. Still, I’m not promising I won’t add a little “good cream,” as M.F.K. Fisher would probably recommend. I’m putting it in the freezer for more wintry days.

As soon as I finished this easy project, I saw that yet another blogger was showing how to make slow-roasted cherry tomatoes. Now I know just what to do with tomorrow’s pickings.