Thursday, October 02, 2008

soup kitchen

This week’s culinary obsession?  Soup.  In the past I’ve gone on quick bread sprees (zucchini, pear, cantaloupe, apple, etc), jam/preserve benders (cherry, strawberry, blueberry, peach, pear, apricot-pineapple, to name a few); this week I’m making soup.  I whipped up some low-carb chicken soup on Tuesday, freezing it for those soon-to-come cold-and-flu days.  Yesterday I had a grand plan of making 5 kinds of soup: Roasted Butternut Squash, Butternut-Apple, Parsnip-Apple, Baked Potato, and Potato-Ham.  Oh, and then I was going to make Butternut Ravioli, and roast all the squash seeds.  The plan was perfect – find the common ingredients, prepare them all at once, list the steps in order by the amount of time it would take, then make the soups  and freeze them.  Flawless. Uh, yeah, right.  I roasted all my butternut squash (3 large in total), baked all the potatoes (there weren’t as many as I thought I’ve bought), sautéed 4 large onions with butter and garlic, chopped the parsnips…and then things got a little off track.  First, I only had enough potatoes for one kind of spud soup, so I went with baked potato (w/ham).  A nice compromise.  I only had one pot big enough to make soup in, so I started with the roasted butternut (my favorite), and while that was simmering, I blended the potato soup.  The nice thing about that soup is that since the potatoes are hot from baking, and the onions from sautéing, there is not other heating to be done – you just put it in the blender and then straight into the freezer (if you’re going that route). 

Alas, I did not have time for cutting up apples, so the butternut-apple and parsnip apple had to wait.  But the other ingredients are ready to go, so it’s just a matter of putting them on the stove.  I did manage to roast the seeds after dance class, but didn’t get to the ravioli either.  Maybe tonight…or maybe tomorrow. J  Then on to the next cooking adventure.

 

ML mentioned going on a processed-food hiatus.  I’m game – never hurts to avoid bleached flour and HFCS.  At least now I’ll have plenty of homemade hot soup to keep me on track… J