Crafty Kim

The best ever roasted butternut squash soup

The main reason I'm posting this: so that next time, when I want to make my favorite butternut squash soup, I won't have to spend an hour paging through a stack of printouts from the internet, searching google, and consulting cookbooks to try to reproduce this recipe. This is really a blend of about 6 different recipes from all over the place, so it seemed worthwhile to write it down this year.

I'm also posting this because this is mind-blowingly awesome and you should make some like... right now. I apologize for not having any photos but we ate this so fast, there wasn't time for pictures :)

ETA: We made the soup again and I managed to get a photo this time!

ZOMG! The Best Evarrr Roasted Butternut Squash Soup!

Ingredients

• 2 butternut squash, peeled and cut into chunks
• 2 small yellow onions, peeled and cut into quarters
• 3 carrots, well-scrubbed or peeled, cut in chunks
• 3 small apples, peeled, cored, and quarter
• 2 heads garlic
• 3 shallots, diced
• 1/2 tsp dried sage
• 1/2 tsp dried thyme
• 1/2 tsp dried oregano
• 5 cups chicken or vegetable stock
• Butter
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• Walnuts, toasted
• Sour cream
• Sagey croutons (see recipe below)

Instructions

1. Place in roasting pan: butternut squash, onion, and carrots. Spray with olive oil and top with salt and pepper. Roast at 400€ degrees F for 40 minutes. Add apples to the pan and roast for 10-20 additional minutes or until everything is tender, for a total of 50-60 minutes roasting.
2. Roast garlic heads wrapped in foil for the same 40-60 minutes at 400 degrees F.

3. Saute shallots in butter over medium-low heat for 5 minutes. Add sage, thyme, and oregano and saute for a few more minutes.
4. Add broth.
5. When squash and carrots are tender, add squash, onions, carrots, apples, and garlic (removed from skin) to the broth mixture.
6. Cook broth mixture for 10-15 minutes over medium-low heat.
7. Puree broth-squash mixture with immersion blender until smooth (or however smooth you prefer). Add salt and pepper to taste.
8. Top with walnuts, sour cream, and sagey croutons.

Sagey Croutons

While not an absolute requirement, these make a nice contrast to the smooth soup.

Ingredients:

• Whole wheat bread, cut into 1/2" cubes
• Olive oil
• 1/2 tsp sage
• Salt
• Pepper
• 1/2 cup shredded parmesan cheese

Instructions:

Place bread cubes on pan with edges. Spread bread cubes with olive oil. Top with sage, salt, pepper, and cheese. Bake in 350 degrees F oven for 15-20 minutes.

Dark Days Challenge Update

I've done a terrible job blogging about our Dark Days experiences. I would say overall, we were doing incredibly well through December because our usual CSA farmers (Bugtussle Farm) were doing occasional deliveries of fresh produce to the Nashville area. We've been relying on our freezer and lots of eggs for the last few weeks and that's been rather unexciting :) Our more exciting butternut squash soup dinner tonight used lots of local ingredients: butternut squash, onions, apples, garlic, and walnuts, plus chicken broth we made from a locally-raised chicken.

Dark Days Challenge: Wishing I loved greens

Fall and winter here in Tennessee are dominated by a lot of foods that I just don't like. Mostly involving greens - turnip greens, collard greens, mustard greens, and more. I've been told that cooking any of these greens long enough (along with some salt pork) makes them tasty. I've never found that to be true. It never fails to surprise me though because I love spinach - it makes no sense to me that I dislike the taste of all of these other greens so much. Local vegetable alternatives to greens? Sweet potatoes, potatoes, squash - some of my favorite vegetables to cook with. I predict you'll be seeing a lot of them in my Dark Days posts over the next few weeks.

Our CSA farmers are true experimenters, with peanuts being the big new crop for this year. The crop was apparently fairly successful too - we ended up with a big bag containing 2 lbs of unroasted peanuts. We roasted the peanuts in the oven for an hour at 250 degrees and then I shelled them. I've never had freshly roasted peanuts before. As with most locally-grown food, the flavor was amazing, nothing like peanuts you buy at the store!

We were also lucky this year to get some fresh ginger that was grown locally. Now, this isn't ginger for the faint of heart - this super fresh, locally-grown ginger has a ton of zing. In fact, it's so strong that it's been a bit of a challenge to use. I thought that sweet potatoes could probably stand up to the ginger flavor though and so we came up with our local meal for the week:

Sweet Potato, Ginger, and Peanut Soup
1 tbsp butter
1 onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
3 cups vegetable or chicken broth
2.5 lbs sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped
1/4 cup fresh ginger, minced or grated
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1 cup milk
Nutmeg, Cayenne Pepper and Salt (to taste)
For topping: chopped cilantro, peanuts, and crystalized ginger

Melt butter in a Dutch oven or other large size pot. Saute onion and garlic in butter until onion is translucent. Add chicken broth to the pot and bring to a simmer. Cook chopped sweet potatoes in the broth until soft, 20-30 minutes. Blend mixture until smooth using a stick blender. Stir in ginger, peanut butter, and milk. Season with nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste. Top with chopped cilantro, chopped peanuts, and crystalized ginger.

We served this with a hearty slice of bread from Twin Forks Farm and an arugula side salad. We followed it up with an apple crisp made from locally grown Arkansas Black apples.

The local tally here:

• Onion, garlic, sweet potatoes, ginger, peanuts, cilantro, arugula: all from Bugtussle Farm
• Chicken broth: made from scratch with a chicken from Peaceful Pastures Farm
• Milk: from Rock Springs Dairy (available at the Produce Place)
• Bread: Twin Forks Farm

Big lesson for the week:
Making chicken broth might be more effort than opening a can but it's not that much more effort. Also, it tastes better, you end up with cooked chicken that you can use in other recipes, and you don't have to worry about what's in the broth (because you know everything that's in it!). A total win.

Dark Days Challenge: A (mostly) local Thanksgiving

We had a quiet and fairly peaceful Thanksgiving. My sister Kathy drove down from Wisconsin. She only stayed for Thursday and then headed home on Friday, after a busy day of cooking, hanging out, and playing Gloom and Ticket to Ride. I failed to get any photos of our Thanksgiving dinner!

Our (mostly local) Thanksgiving menu:

Turkey
Sweet potato gratin
Mashed potatoes
Bread stuffing with apples
Green jello salad
Olives and pickles
Cranberry sauce
Pumpkin pie

Our turkey came from a local food co-op that does a vegetable CSA and a meat CSA - Avalon Acres. This is our second year with a turkey from them and both years we've had moist, flavorful, and incredibly tasty turkey. We used the same cooking approach as last year: we roasted the turkey breast-side down until the last hour. This protects the breast from the heat and keeps the breast meat moist. Then we flipped the turkey breast-side up (infinitely less scary to do than it sounds!) for the last hour of cooking. Delicious!

Tim made his "only allowed on Thanksgiving because it's so unhealthy" specialty - sweet potato gratin. Layers of thinly sliced sweet potatoes, cream, brown sugar, dried cranberries, and pecans.

We even managed to put a more local spin on the green jello salad, by using local cream and pecans. We talked about skipping the jello salad this Thanksgiving (to go totally local), but it's Tim's grandmother's recipe and he loves it dearly. Wouldn't feel like Thanksgiving without it. My non-local "must haves" for Thanksgiving were black olives and whole berry cranberry sauce.

Thanksgiving local ingredient breakdown:

• Sweet potatoes (gratin), potatoes (mashed potatoes), onions (stuffing), pumpkin (pie) - Bugtussle CSA
• Bread for the stuffing - Twin Forks Farm
• Pecans (jello salad) - Nashville Farmers Market
• Cream (jello salad, gratin) - Hatcher Family Dairy
• Milk (mashed potatoes) - Rock Springs Dairy

Thanksgiving non-local ingredient breakdown: Celery (stuffing), Pineapple (jello salad), Green jello (jello salad), Sage & thyme (turkey and stuffing), Sour cream & cream cheese (mashed potatoes), olives, cranberry sauce, pickles

I was actually really surprised and happy to see how much of our Thanksgiving dinner could be sourced locally. The highlight? Making Dorie Greenspan's Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie using fresh pumpkins from our CSA. We roasted the pumpkins in the oven and then pureed them. The pie needed extra cooking time because of extra moisture in the pumpkin, but it was so delicious that it was worth the extra work.

Dark Days Challenge Gets Started!

Tim and I were doing the whole "locavore" thing long before it was the Oxford American Dictionary's 2007 Word of the Year. For the past three years, we've been part of a CSA with Bugtussle Farm. We love our farmers! We also have the good luck to live just a few blocks from the Nashville Farmer's Market and on top of that made the East Nashville Farmer's Market part of our weekly routine all summer long. Nashville is also the home to two great small markets: the Produce Place and the Turnip Truck. In almost too many ways to count, Nashville is an amazing place to live for fresh produce.

The challenge, of course, comes when the chilly days roll in and several of the farmers markets close up for the year. How do you eat locally when you can't just walk over to the market and pick up 20 different kinds of lettuce? This year, we're going to try to get over this challenge by joining the Dark Days Challenge hosted by the Laura of the Urban Hennery.

Here are our rules for the challenge:

1. Once a week we will cook at least one meal with 90% local ingredients
2. Our definition of local: grown or produced within 150 miles of Nashville
3. For items like cheese and pasta that are produced locally, we will find out where the producers are sourcing their ingredients and promote use of local ingredients whenever possible
4. Outside of our once-a-week local meal, we'll try to eat as locally as possible the rest of the week and keep a list of the local ingredients we're using
5. We will try to find local sources for grains. Our search for this has been futile so far, but we'll put some extra effort into it this winter. If you're in the Middle Tennessee area and know of some place to get local grains, let me know!

Here is our first effort for the Dark Days Challenge: Flannel Hash. This dish almost feels like cheating because we've had most of it in our freezer for a couple of weeks.

Red Flannel Hash (for two)
Adapted from The Big Book of Breakfasts

Ingredients
3 potatoes, peels left on
1 sweet potato, peeled
2 beets, peeled
3 slices of bacon, diced
1 small onion, chopped
2 eggs
Rosemary, chopped finely
Chives, chopped finely
Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
Coarsely chop the potatoes, sweet potato, and beets trying to make the pieces approximately the same size. Steam until they're the right cooked texture for you - that's about 12 minutes for us.

In a large frying pan, cook bacon and onion over medium heat until onion is translucent. Mix in the cooked potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beets. Add the rosemary, salt (if needed), and pepper. Cook undisturbed for about 6 minutes, then turn and cook undisturbed for an additional 10 minutes (this will help give the hash a nice crust).

Divide mixture on two plates and top each serving with a fried egg. Top with chopped chives.

Where were our ingredients from?

• Beets - some super nice farmers from the East Nashville Farmer's Market, but I totally failed to get their farm name and info
• Potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, eggs (check out how yellow the egg yolks are!) - Bugtussle Farm
• Bacon - Peaceful Pastures Farm
• Chives, rosemary - our own herb garden