Chipotle Pear and Roasted Squash Soup with Apple Butter Cornbread

This is a thick soup. It is the kind of soup that you have to be careful with when it is on the stove. It is the kind of soup that makes “plop” sounds as it bubbles. It is the kind of soup that you need to keep a lid on when you reheat it, and then hold that lid in front of you like a shield when you stir it. Otherwise you may end up with a searing hot glob of soupy deliciousness in your eye. If you think you can handle these safety precautions, forge ahead for a very belly-warming experience.

This is a soup I made without a recipe, and so writing it up as a recipe has proven challenging. I tried to measure. But many measurements are just rough approximations and you really just need to add things “to taste”. I always taste as I go along and then add a little bit more of this or that until it tastes how I want it to. If this is a cooking method you are not familiar with, a soup is a great place to start. It is hard to mess a soup up. One of the only ways you can go wrong is if you add too much of something (salt comes to mind) but even in such a case you can add more liquid and dilute the flavour. Just remember, add a little, taste, add a little, taste.

The squash I used are all winter squash, but they are wild hybrids that emerged from our compost this summer. They had all different tastes and textures and looks. They are the franken-children of cross-pollinated Hubbard squash, Kabocha squash, Buttercup squash and more that I can’t think of. So basically you can use any kind of squash for this recipe!! Have fun!

Chipotle Pear and Roasted Squash Soup

6 cups roasted squash
olive oil
2 medium onions, diced
3 stalks celery (or 2 tsp of ground celery seed)
5 large potatoes, washed and diced
1 tbsp of ginger, finely chopped or grated
4 large pears, cored and chopped
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tsp nutmeg
2 heaping tbsp of chopped garlic (or less for the faint of heart)
2 tsp ground chipotle pepper (or 2 or 3 chopped chipotle peppers and some adobo sauce)
8 cups broth (veggie, chicken, beef, whatever you like)
salt and pepper

I used about 4 medium squashes which came to measure about 6 cups of squash once they were roasted. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F. Cut your squash in half, scoop out the seeds, peel the skin off, and then dice the flesh into about 1-2″ pieces. Toss all your squash pieces in olive oil and then put them on a baking sheet and roast them until the are soft and golden brown in spots (about 20 min).

While you squash is baking, get out your big soup pot and put it on the oven ring at about medium heat. Glug in some olive oil and then throw in your diced onions, ginger and celery or celery seed (I used celery seed because I didn’t have any celery). Let this saute for a little bit. As the onions start to get glossy, toss in your diced potato (again, 1-2″ squares, roughly, and you don’t need to peel them just cut off any nasty bits and make sure they are clean), and your diced pears (same size as potatoes, and they don’t need to be peeled either, but you can if you don’t like peels). Toss in your cumin and nutmeg and chipotle pepper. Let it all saute together, periodically adding a little splash of your broth to capture all the sugars caramelizing on the bottom of the pan. It should smell very nice.

Once your squash is ready take it out of the oven and add it to your soup pot with the rest of your broth. Give it a good stir all together. Bring it to a boil and then turn it down and let it simmer gently until your potato pieces are soft. Now here is a good time to start tasting. At this point I add salt to the soup. Add a little, taste, add a little, taste, until I like it. I also add garlic. Yes, garlic at the end, more or less. I like garlic a lot, and the less it is cooked the healthier it is. But if you aren’t into strong garlic taste, throw it in in the beginning when you are cooking the onions and ginger. This way the taste will be much milder. While your soup is simmering it is a good time to make your corn bread and throw it in the oven still hot from roasting the squash.

Now whiz the soup up with the hand blender and add a bit more cumin, nutmeg, chipotle pepper and black pepper to taste (or not if it already tastes pretty good to you). If it is too thick, add some more broth, or some cream or milk. If it is too runny, let it simmer down for a little while. This is where you make the soup how you like it.

Apple Butter Cornbread

There are so many ways to make corn bread. This one goes particularly well with this soup because the mild taste of spices from the apple butter are very complimentary to the soup flavours, and using apple butter instead of eggs makes for a very soft texture. If you don’t have any apple butter and don’t want to make it, you can substitute 1/2 c apple sauce or 2 eggs.

1 c flour
3/4 cornmeal
2-3 tbsp sugar
2.5 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 c apple butter (follow link to recipe)
1 c milk
1/4 c melted butter or vegetable oil
1 tbsp butter

Preheat oven to 400 degrees (it should already be this hot from roasting the squash).

Combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Mix it evenly. I find a whisk works well for this.

Combine the apple butter, milk and melted butter or oil. A whisk also works well for this.

Combine your wet ingredients with your dry, and stir them together. Don’t over-mix it. Think pancake batter.

Melt your 1 tbsp of butter in a cast iron skillet (medium size) by putting it in the oven for a few minutes. Swirl it to coat the sides of the pan. Pour your batter into the hot skillet and bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean and the cornbread is a nice golden brown (I like it to be crusty).

Serve hot with your soup and enjoy!

Apple Butter

This recipe shall be referred to for many other recipes of moist appley goodness. Heck we made apple butter cornbread tonight! It was the best best! Use apple butter in place of apple sauce for a more intense aromatic experience in any recipe!

Apple Butter

adapted (not really) from this recipe from Turntable Kitchen

4 pounds of apples, peeled, cored and cut into small cubes
2 long strips of lemon zest
3 cinnamon sticks
6 cloves
3-4 tbsp brown sugar
3 c. orange juice

Place the cinnamon sticks, cloves and lemon zest in a small piece of cheesecloth and tie it into a little pouch.

Place all ingredients into a large pot with the spice pouch. Bring to a boil then reduce temperature to a simmer and cover. Don’t forget to occasionally stir the pot or it will burn on the bottom and make you apple butter a dark brown instead of anice caramel colour.

Let it all simmer on low for a couple of hours and fill your house with its amazing smell.

Once it has reached a thickness and colour that you like, remove the spice pouch and wizz it all up with a hand blender so that it is smooth and creamy.Store in nice clean jars in the fridge. It keeps for a long time. But use it in many things until it is all gone. If you put it in warm jars when it is still hot it will probably seal the jar lids, but don’t be fooled! Keep it in the fridge!

Apple Upside-down Apple Butter Apple Cake of Apples

Apple crumble. Apple cobbler. Apple butter. Apple jelly. Apple pie. Apple cider. Apple butter waffles. Apple apple apple. What a strange looking word. I find if I say (or write) a word enough times I can return to a state of mind where it is strange to me again. It’s like I am meeting apple for the first time, and feeling that it does not really suit the fruit it signifies.

We have been inundated with apples since September. RRTT’s mom and pops have an old MacIntosh apple tree and we picked them all. There are finally only about 10 or so apples left, and all of the above apple products have been resorted to in dealing with them. The appliest apple moment of this apple mania was when I apple-upside-downed this recipe for apple butter bundt cake, resulting in the Apple Upside-down Apple Butter Apple Cake of Apples.

I came across the recipe for apple butter bundt cake in the spring when I was trying to find a way to use up my apple butter from the previous summer. It resulted in the most hideous looking monster of a cake that luckily tasted quite good, and was lovely and moist and soft. Very soft. I brought it, still in the bundt pan, to a family dinner at my parents’ house. I turned it upside down to remove it from the pan and it did not come. I put a warm wet cloth on the outside of the bundt pan to loosen it from the pan gently (a trick of my mama’s). My youngest brother swaggered in and hit it with a thwack. The bottom half of my cake came out of the pan. The hideous cake that followed was as a result of numerous suggestions from the peanut gallery that went like this: “Stick it back together with jam and whipped cream…cover up the broken parts with a glaze…ewwww cover up the glaze with icing sugar…” it just went on and on. The cake was too heavy to have a layer of whipped cream in the middle. It just oozed out the side under the weight of the top layer, and my glaze was an awful improvised mixture of plum jam and icing sugar and too much water. And I didn’t have a sieve to sprinkle the icing sugar nicely…bad bad bad. By the time it was done I could not stop laughing.

Much love for the most hideous cake I’ve ever made.

This time I decided to abandon the bundt cake pan and use up more apples. If you don’t already have some nice homemade apple butter, check out the post for it. It is very easy and yummy, great for baking with, great for spreading on toast, or using to make your own bbq sauce for pork.

Apple Upside-down Apple Butter Apple Cake of Apples

*cake adapted from this recipe for Apple Bundt Cake on a funny blog called eggton

Upside-down apples:

3 apples
1 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/3 c brown sugar
2 tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla

Cake:

3 c. flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 c. butter (at room temperature)
1 1/3 c. packed brown sugar
1/3 c. honey
1 tsp. vanilla
2 eggs
2 c. apple butter

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Upside down apples:

Peel, core and slice the apples. Arrange them in the bottom of a 9 x 13″ greased pan. Sprinkle with lemon juice.

Melt butter in a small pot. Add brown sugar and vanilla and stir over medium heat until dissolved. Drizzle evenly over the apples in the pan.

Cake:

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl (flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon).

Beat butter with brown sugar until fluffy. Add honey and vanilla. Beat. Add eggs. Beat. Stir in apple butter (don’t beat or it will schlop everywhere).

Add dry ingredients to your wet ones. Stir until mixed. Pour into the greased pan on top of your apples and brown sugar mixture.

Bake until a toothpick comes out of the middle of the cake clean (about 45-60 min). Allow the cake to cool in the pan. Then loosen the sides of the cake and turn it upside down on a plate so that the apples are on top and the caramel oozes into the cake.