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!

Multigrain No-Knead Bread vs. the Internet

There is a recipe at the end of this post I promise…

Sometimes the Internet makes me feel weird things. For instance, I no longer allow myself to look at anything on the Internet about the band the Strokes. When I do, I get a really weird feeling.

I may start by looking at a music video. I enjoy the music. It’s so feel-good, so upbeat, so dancey.  In fact I really freakin’ love the Strokes. They make me want to dance to death. But my enjoyment of the music is soon overshadowed by a strange and frightening passion for Julian Casablancas. For those who don’t know, he is the lead singer of the Strokes. Seeing him singing and dancing around makes me crazy.

If I just watched the music video on TV, I would get a bit silly, but I would have to carry on with my day once the video was over and something else came on. But with the Internet I can indulge myself, and every single time I have watched a Strokes video I have then started on an obsessive rampage across the Web, looking at photos of JC, reading about him, watching other music videos, interviews, any and all content about Julian Casablancas. The weird feeling is this: I actually start to feel deeply upset that Julian Casablancas isn’t my boyfriend. The more things I look at, the stronger it becomes. I start to devise plans as to how I might meet him, how I would come across as different from all of those other crazy fans (because I’m obviously not one of those), and we’d fall in love…I think about all of this seriously.

How does this happen to me? I’m not a pre-teen anymore. I don’t have to create fantasies, I’ve had experiences, I’ve lived life! And I am so happy in my own life, with my lovely lovely RRTT, and our little baby, and our wonderful friends and family. I should be able to put JC into perspective. And eventually I do, even if it takes me a few hours (days) to fully recover.

Now Julian is an extreme case. When I finally encountered him in real life (another story for another time) I discovered that it’s not just me. The poor sap is cursed with some strange magnetism that makes whole swaths of the population want to touch him. But even though he lived up to all my expectations, experiencing him in real life was MUCH less upsetting than stalking him online.

Why? I think the Internet is a place where I (and I’m assuming others folks too) can lose myself in an abyss of images and information. This abyss allows me to extend myself deeply and rapidly into the lives of others but does not require that I represent myself there, and even if I choose to represent myself I do not have to perform my physical self or in real-time. This results in a certain type of dislocation and feelings of dissatisfaction, or discomfort, from being neither one thing nor the other.

The Internet allows me to be a fly on the wall so to speak. I am not Julian’s girlfriend, I am not myself, but I’m not even a fly. I am a ghost caught between identities, real, perceived, imagined. And it feels weeeeeeeird.

This all came to mind when my friend Dishy shared a link to a lovely little blog by Nick Zammuto, former 1/2 of the Books. He and his wife have an awesome homestead. But rather than draw inspiration from it (which is obviously their reason for sharing it) my initial reaction was to feel a bit upset that they had found this property in Vermont before I did. What a crazy thought. I haven’t been looking for land in Vermont. Yet for a moment I wanted to steal their life.

My use of the internet often seems to counter my attempts to be present in my own life, to be happy and satisfied with who I am and what I am doing, and to be patient and productive in this satisfaction. But the internet is such an amazing place to share ideas and get inspiration from others, so we just gotta find ways to help us stay present.

The solution is in the recipe. Bake bread.

Nothing centers me so happily in my own skin like a hot slice of homemade bread with butter and honey. And this method is super duper easy. Where did I get the recipe? The internet of course.

No-Knead Multigrain Bread yields about 3-4 medium loaves

adapted from a recipe on The Italian Dish

3 c warm water
1.5 tbsp instant yeast
1 tbsp sea salt
2 c all-purpose flour
4 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c 5 grain mix (rolled oats, flax seeds, millet, amaranth and bulgur wheat)

Here’s what I do. I put the warm water in a large glass bowl that has a seal-able lid. I add the yeast and salt and swish it around. I then just dump in the flours and the grain mix and stir it until it is all evenly mixed. No need to KNEAD! Just mix.

 

Put the lid on so it is covering the dough, but not sealed tight so that air cannot escape from the bowl. Put it in a warm place and leave it to rise until the dough forms a flat surface in the bowl. Then seal the lid and put the bowl in the fridge. Technically you can make the bread right away, but because it is a pretty sticky dough it is easier to work with once it is chilled. Give it at least a couple of hours.

Sprinkle some flour on the surface of the dough and spread some on your hands. Grab a chunk of dough (I usually do 1/3 or 1/4 of the total dough) and fold the dough in under itself to create a smooth outer surface for your loaf. You have to work it a bit and sprinkle flour on the dough to prevent it from ripping as you stretch it. You want to create surface tension. Form a couple of loaves (or one or whatever) and place them on parchment paper on a chopping board.

Let the dough sit for about 30 min. Meanwhile, heat your oven to 400 degrees F. Place an ovenproof tray on the bottom shelf with some water in it. This will create lots of nice steam inside to give you a really crusty crust. Put a tray on the top shelf (located in the middle of the oven) and allow it to get hot.

Sprinkle some flour on the top of your loaves and cuts some lines in the dough to allow for the loaf to expand in the heat. Slide the parchment paper off of your cutting board on to the hot baking tray. Bake loaves for about 30-40 min. You want a dark crust. The bread is ready when you can tap the bottom of the loaf and it sounds like a drum.

SOURDOUGH! If you leave the dough for a few days in the fridge it will develop a sourdough taste. We like this so we always leave the dough for a good while (you can keep it in the fridge for up to 2 weeks or even longer if you like really sour bread!) If you want sourdough, keep reusing the same bowl. Make sure there is some dough left over on the sides of the bowl when you make a new batch and your sourdough taste will develop a lot more quickly. Now that I have been making the dough for a while I add less yeast because there are natural yeasts in the dough. We always have a batch of dough in the fridge ready for baking whenever we need more bread.

You can really play around with this recipe. Experiment with different flours, less salt, less yeast, longer rise time, longer refrigeration time. All will effect the texture and taste of the dough.

Most delicious whole wheat waffles

For Mother’s Day this year I made my mom a waffle breakfast, complete with whipped cream, strawberries and Van Morrison (her fave). Because it was a special day I bought some real maple syrup. I didn’t feel like myself buying it. Maple syrup has always seemed out of my league. Perhaps I was feeling a bit flashy because it was my first mother’s day. Perhaps it was a date with destiny, a precursor the great waffle comeback…

When my siblings and I were children (5 in total) our house was never a place where any sort of treat lasted long. The reigning philosophy was to  consume as much as you could as quickly as possible. Anyone who wished to savour something nice would just miss out unless he or she hid it quite well. We were a crafty and insatiable crew.

With this in mind that Mother’s Day morning, I put my small $12 bottle of maple syrup on the table hesitantly, feeling greedy and nervous that my teenage brothers would drown their waffles in my liquid gold. Part of me wanted to say, “Get your free-loading hands off this maple syrup, I bought it with my OWN money, and it is only for mothers.” and then ration them their syrup for each waffle. They’d be all like “What? That’s not enough! Look how much you gave yourself!” and I’d say “It’s not BROTHER’S day” and kick them under the table.

If I were to succumb to this urge another Mother’s Day would have been wrecked by our petty disagreements. Had we ever succeeded at this Mother’s Day test? Might we finally, now that I, the eldest, was 25 and had a bun in the oven myself? Was the maple syrup so important? I was really feeling like it was. I was ready to grab it as soon as someone reached for it.

To my surprise none of my siblings wanted the maple syrup. They chose the maple and butter-flavoured syrup. Pancake syrup. Sometimes I feel like my teenage siblings are crazy (they spend hours watching funny cat videos on YouTube). But I’m not complaining. I said nothing and passed the maple syrup to my parents quietly, maturely you might even say. There was no bickering.

The whole experience got me back on the waffle train in a big way. Obviously waffles are a great excuse for eating maple syrup. In the weeks leading up to my due date I experimented with lots of different waffle recipes. I abandoned the method of whipping the egg whites and folding them in to achieve that waffle fluff. As far as I’m concerned the texture is not so superior to the baking powder waffle recipes as to warrant the extra effort. This is the recipe I eventually worked out. I like it better than all the rest, except for an apple butter waffle recipe that I will share when I have apple butter again, which will be soon, because its apple season!

I don’t go 100% whole wheat, but you easily could. They’d just be a bit heavier. Sometimes I use a mixture of whole wheat, white and barley flour. The barley flour is the only thing that gives waffles (or pancakes for that matter) a density that makes them filling enough for RRTT to consider them a legitimate meal. I find this recipe totally sufficient. I made tons of them, froze them, and then cooked them in the toaster once I had my baby and needed something quick and mapley at random times of the day or night.

Whole Wheat Waffles

1 c whole wheat flour
3/4 c all-purpose flour
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp sea salt
2 farm eggs
1 3/4 c milk
1/2 c melted butter
2 tsp vanilla

Mix wet.

Beat eggs and milk together.

Add melted butter.

Add vanilla and mix.

Mix dry.

Combine flours, baking soda, sugar and salt. Mix ’em or sift ’em.

Mix wet and dry together.

Mix.

Mix mix.

Pour batter onto greased waffle griddle.

I put about 1/2 c of batter onto mine.

Cook until golden and crispy.

Like this.

Top with butter and maple sizzurp and enjoy!!

Top with a decoratively sliced plum (optional).