Butternut Squash Soup in the Crockpot

“You have a food blog?”  Yes, and I start updating it, and then I get pregnant and stop cooking due to nonstop vomiting, and then it’s summer (too hot for most soup), and then I’m busy with a newborn/toddler. Rinse and repeat.

But, I made soup today, and I’m delighted to share it with you. I’m going to stop cooking again in about a month (due 10-10), but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have some butternut squash available so you can enjoy this soup all autumn.

This soup is about as low-maintenance as they come. The lovely thing about butternut squash is that you can soupify it in all sorts of ways and it still tastes amazing. I started with this recipe as my base and then adjusted it according to what sounded good and what I had on hand.

Butternut Squash Soup in the Crockpot

1 medium/large butternut squash

1/2 yellow onion

4 tablespoons butter (1/2 stick)

1/2 apple (any kind will do, though people often use granny smith; I used gala)

1/2 tsp dried sage (or more to taste; I LOVE sage)

1/8 tsp cayenne

3 cups chicken stock

1/2 brick (4 oz) cream cheese

salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

Place the butter and the onion (chopped) in the bottom of your crockpot and turn the crockpot on high. Wash the squash, cut it in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds and then cut again width-wise. Add the 4 pieces of squash to the crockpot cut-side down (or facing the sides). Add peeled, chopped apple chunks over the top of the squash. Put the lid on your pot and let it cook for a few hours (3 or 4), until the onions are lightly browned and the squash is soft and possibly browning where it is in contact with the pot. (This is my lazy approximation of lightly caramelizing the onions and roasting the squash … it’s cooling off here, but not enough to roast a squash in my oven mid-day!)

When your squash is cooked, take it out of the crockpot with tongs and let it cool on a cutting board until it is cool enough to handle. Scoop out the flesh and add it back to the crockpot. Add sage, cayenne, salt and pepper. If you’re like me, you did this when your toddler was distracted in the morning, so you can let it sit in the crockpot on your counter for a few hours. If you’re not like me, this is the time when you add the chicken stock and let the soup simmer on low for an hour or two. About 30 minutes before serving, add the cream cheese and when it is warm/melted, puree the soup either in the blender (using small batches and being very careful because hot liquid and blenders are a dangerous combo) or with an immersion/stick blender (seriously, everybody should have one of these). Add the cream cheese and stir well when it is warm/melted.

Serve the soup with a garnish of your choice. I dabbed about a teaspoon of goat cheese on top of ours and served the soup with quesadillas filled with grilled chicken, goat cheese, caramelized onions and a basalmic reduction drizzle.  Why, yes, they were delicious, and when we finished the meal with apple crisp made from apples I picked off of our tree today, it was a perfect autumn meal.

#butternut #crockpot #vegetable

Black Bean Soup for 1, 2 or 4

I’m in the mood for Black Bean Soup for lunch. It’s 11:37 and I’m hungry; how on earth am I going to pull this off?  Easy! I’m going to pull the half-can of leftover tomato sauce in my fridge, the half-used box of chicken stock, a can of black beans and a few other ingredients and make myself some Black Bean Soup.

If you don’t have much time, you have a few staple ingredients on hand and you like a healthy, flavorful soup, have I got a meal for you!

This is a fantastic go-to Black Bean Soup recipe. Right now, I’m cutting it in half and subbing tomato sauce for tomatoes because that’s what I need to use up, but go ahead and make the full batch. You’ll enjoy having it for leftovers the next day. And, don’t forget to serve it over brown rice (freshly cooked or leftover) to make an even more filling meal and a complete protein (rice + beans = complete protein).

Black Bean Soup

1 can chicken broth 2 cans black beans (drained and rinsed) 1 can diced tomatoes 1/2 onion 1 tablespoon oregano 1 clove garlic, chopped salt & pepper to taste 1 or 2 jalapenos (optional)

Directions

Throw everything in a pot and let simmer 20-30 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. You can also consider pureeing some or all of the soup with an immersion blender, but that’s not necessary (and considering how fast and easy this soup is, why would you dirty another dish, even one as easy to clean as your immersion blender?).

Serve over brown rice and squeeze fresh lime juice over each serving.

#BlackBeans

Unassuming Artisian Bread

I made Beef (well, elk)-Barley soup yesterday. It wasn’t blog-worthy. You could do a search for “Beef-Barley soup” and come up with dozens of better recipes. I mean, Beef-Barley soup is pretty basic and hard to mess up, but it’s also hard to come up with a truly outstanding recipe. I’ll probably try to follow this recipe the next time I get the Beef-Barley hankering. I’ll let you know if I come up with something extraordinary.

In the meantime, I made this bread to go with the soup, and it WAS blog-worthy.

I don’t know what to call this bread. Deb at Smitten Kitchen calls it “Bread Without a Timetable.” That’s a mouthful. Let’s maybe call it “Unassuming Artisian Bread”?

Give it a try; it’s low-key enough that I was able to make it while doing about 10 other things, and everybody who tried it thought it quite good. I might try adapting the recipe a bit in the future – maybe add some wheat bran, millet, sunflower seeds and/or flax seeds to make it a little “meatier.” I like a hearty bread with some fun texture added.

Ingredients (this is adapted quite a bit from the original recipe, so be sure to check it out, along with her instructions for shaping a baguette)

1/2 cup white flour (I might have used more, but that’s all I had) 3 1/4 cups wheat flour (I used Wheat MT’s Prairie Gold, because that’s what I had) 1 heaping teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon yeast (regular or rapid rise) 1 1/2 cups warm liquid (She says to use a combo of water and milk; I used 1 T orange juice, 1 T olive oil, 1/4 c. milk and the rest warm water)

Directions

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl or your mixing bowl. Add the liquid and combine; the dough should be sticky but kneadable (stickier than regular bread dough). I suspect this is a pretty forgiving recipe, so don’t worry too much about the texture of the dough, just make sure it leans toward sticky. Knead for a few minutes and then cover the bowl with a damp towel or saran wrap and set aside.

She is really, really vague about how long you let the dough rest; vague enough that I didn’t really know what to do except that from my other knowledge of no-knead breads, I figured I should let it rise for quite a while. So I let it rise for about 4-5 hours, then I punched it down and let it rise another 30 minutes, and then I shaped the loaf and let it rise another 30 minutes. I’d say you could probably go as little as an hour or two for the first rise, but you could also let it set all night and it would probably be okay. I think the point of this recipe is that it sort of takes care of itself and you can make it fit around your schedule.

When you are ready to bake your bread, preheat your oven to 450, OR you can put your bread in the oven while it preheads.  Shape your loaf (I did a baguette, although a regular round loaf would probably be lovely), use a serrated knife to cut some slashes in it, brush a little water on top (this helps the crust be nice and crusty), and pop it in the oven.

Bake at 450 for 30 minutes, then turn the oven down to 425 and start checking your bread for doneness using the “sounds hollow when I tap the bottom” method or whatever other way you think might work. My crust got super crusty and was almost burnt after about 40 minutes, so I took it out, but the inside probably could have baked a little bit more (she gives a range of 5-20 minutes after the initial half-hour at 450).

Nobody seemed to mind slightly-underbaked bread, though; I barely had enough left to have toast for breakfast. I will be making this again soon.

#bread