Sunday, January 16, 2011

Butternut Squash, Carrot & Ginger Soup

So what did I decide to do on a cold miserable snowy weekend? Stay indoors? Oh no no. Quite the opposite actually. I woke up Saturday and looked out the kitchen window to see beautiful snowflakes falling. Rundle Park looked gorgeous. So gorgeous that I decided to drag Jamie and Khuno out in the bitter cold to take some engagement photos! Who took the pictures you might ask? Well, we did. I'll post about what happened another day. So after coming in from the cold, I wanted some nice warm soup and recalled Arlie having some butternut carrot soup for lunch one day. 
This half a butternut squash is from January 3rd's dinner. That thing sat on our counter for probably 2 days before I threw it into the fridge for hibernation. Did I ever mention how amazing our new fridge is? It keeps produce edible for almost forever! I'm not kidding! Check out this zucchini! 
Not a word of a lie. That poor thing sat in the veggie compartment for almost 5 weeks. F-I-V-E!!! I never did eat it although I'm sure I could have if I were really hungry and craving zucchini. Now back to this soup I was making. I poked around on allrecipes and found this recipe. I didn't follow it exactly. Come to think of it, do we ever follow recipes exactly? I decided to roast everything in the oven because I think that's what Arlie said she did. 
Coat everything in a bit of canola oil (I've learned that I hate the taste of extra virgin olive oil) and roast. I put it in the oven at 350 but realized after a little while that it wasn't going to caramelize the veggies the way I wanted so I cranked it up to 425. 
I just realized how awful the picture looks. The colors are neon orange to super bad in the roasted picture. I can assure you, I am not a very good photographer but both photographs are of the same veggies. I threw all that into a pot of water and let it boil for a bit. Then Jamie blended it up with the Bamix. I asked him if a Vitamix would be able to make the soup feel like a cloud because Penny's Vitamix sure made our avocado shakes taste like clouds. We both agreed that it likely could but we can't afford a $600 blender and we were both way too lazy to strain it so grainy soup it was! Grainy and delicious!  
Now to go with our soup, we made some quinoa with peas (not very tasty this time around) and a beet salad. This is the recipe I always go back to but I never have all the ingredients. Our salad tonight consisted of only beets, onion, avocado and toasted almonds. We also needed to improvise the dressing: 
-juice of 1 lemon
-1 tbsp of dijon mustard
-a few splashes of red wine vinegar
-a few splashes of balsamic vinegar
-a few squeezes of honey
-a pinch of celery seeds


Jamie wanted to try some raw beets so he sliced some up and we both gagged a bit. Maybe it's because the beets are over 2 weeks old, but they were quite bitter. So he decided to make beet chips! 
All he did was throw them in the oven after I was done roasting the veggies and let the residual heat cook them. When they looked dried and shriveled, he pulled them out and sprinkled some salt. 
Don't they look appetizing? You're right, they actually weren't. But they did look pretty sitting on top of the soup! 

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