squash soups

The thing about the working/student life is that sometimes you gotta get a lot of mileage out of your ingredients.  One thing needs to turn into two or more meals.  That's my mantra when I'm grocery shopping.  I bought a butternut squash from the farmer's market after getting to a soup recipe in Cooking for Geeks.  It took another month or so for me to finally get around to making it.  Shit stores very nicely - yet another important aspect for the working/student life.

Butternut squash, Apple, and Vadouvan soup with apples from Seminar and garlic bread from JJ - this is the last time I'll mention the bread... I think.
Adapted recipe:
1 medium butternut square, peeled and cut into cubes
1 small onion, peeled and chopped
1-2 T olive oil
1 large tart apple, cored and chopped
1 T vadouvan
1T hot curry powder
2 c chicken or vegetable broth
2-3 t honey
2-3 t lemon juice
1/2 t black pepper
Cook squash, onion, and oil in stockpot until softened.  Add apples, cook another two minutes.  Add vadouvan and curry powder (except I just used 2 T curry powder because I have no budget to get more spices), cook until spices slightly toasted and fragrant.  Add broth, bring to a boil, then reduce and simmer for 20 minutes.  Take off the heat, and puree the soup until smooth.  Or, in the case that you are making this before your roommate gets an immersion blender for Christmas... blend it in batches in Magic Bullet.  Stir in honey, lemon, black pepper.  Return to pot and cook on low about five minutes.
It turned out super thick, more like a sauce than a soup.  But that didn't bother me.  Half of it went into the freezer, and the other half went into my tummy.

I saved and toasted the seeds to add texture to the soup, and both things came in handy around the time I made ribs.  There were a lot of different layers of sweetness going on, cut by the spiciness of the ribs.  I threw in some spinach halfway through because the lack of greens was really getting to me.

I've been very good about not buying chips or more Goldfish since that first week when I literally ate Goldfish for lunch on the weekends.  [Now it's all about the pretzels, but that's besides the point.]  I am not a responsible snacker, so my quick and easy solution is to just avoid having it in the home.  I get my potato chip fix at Seminar every Monday and at potluck get-togethers.

So last semester, I made a resolution to snack healthy with popcorn and chickpeas.  I made these spicy roasted chickpeas as a desk snack.  They were supposed to last at least two days, but that was a silly joke.  They lasted a night.  And they never made it to my desk.

[I think I'm moving on to sunflower seeds next.]

Well sometime after I binged on chickpeas, I stumbled upon this.  And just in time to thaw the other portion of soup.  Trust me, I feel the void left by the lack of gruyere just looking at this picture, but my hands were tied by my self-imposed food budget.  I wasn't disappointed though.

In case you were wondering, this one pot of soup lasted me through six meals.