Creamy Butternut Squash Soup

I think my photography is getting better. This is yesterday's lunch, made with water, soy milk, pureed (local) squash, spices, and lavender from the garden.

Hot Soup and Rich Beer

It's one of those random cold days after it should be well into spring. Tomorrow I'll be lolling about on a sunny hillside, sprawling on blankets, laughing with friends, and snacking on hummus and flatbread. Today, however, it was seriously time for some soup. This is just water with some broth cubes dropped in, frozen spinach, frozen peas, penne, sauteed onions, and a few spices. I have also been loving the new Paradise Porter from Diamond Bear Brewing Company. It's a weird name, but a good beer.

Curried Pumpkin and Kale Soup

Oh, hello there. I'm a curried pumpkin and kale soup. I look delicious and innocent, but I have a dark secret. I started life, as do most pumpkin soups, as a can of pumpkin at the grocery store. Maggie and Jay brought me home and I sat in the cabinet for a few days, awaiting my debut.

Then, one night, among much revelry and perhaps a few drinks, Jay decided to make me into a pumpkin pie. Maggie wrote down the recipe that she likes, and brought it to him in the kitchen before returning to the living room to chat and watch movies with everyone else. I was delighted! A delicious pie! It was about halfway through the process that I got nervous. Jay didn't seem to be looking at the recipe much, and instead was tossing in ingredients without measuring them. Dubious.

Nevertheless, I trusted Jay. I mean, he made that great aioli last week, and delicious guacamole. Surely he wouldn't do me wrong. I was poured into a crust and put in the oven. I baked. And I baked. And then I baked some more until I was getting extremely worried. Everyone had gone into the backyard by the fire and seemed to have totally forgotten me. When Jay finally returned and alarmedly took me out of the oven, it was not a pretty sight. I was dark chocolate brown and, as Maggie quickly concluded, did not taste anything like pie should taste.

I was devastated. They banished me to the refrigerator and decided to think about me later. After waiting so long to satisfy them with my delicious, squashy goodness I knew I'd likely be thrown out into the compost heap. The next night, however, something magical happened.

Maggie, John, and Jay were again spending time in the living room, and John suggested that they might make a soup for dinner. Maggie volunteered to make some crusty french rolls to go with it, and while she was in the kitchen, ended up making the main dish as well. She started with 4 cups of vegetable broth made from bouillon. When the broth was simmering, she did something brilliant and magical. She scooped out most of my mushy, pie interior and dumped me into the broth. Jay whisked me into oblivion while she chopped kale. Once I was entirely incorporated with the broth, she added the kale, some more water, curry, ginger, salt, and sriracha.

I couldn't believe my good fortune. Instead of being tossed heartlessly into the compost heap, I had been reinvented as a delicious fall soup that everyone loved. I was soaked up into bread and eaten ravenously by the multitudes.

VeganMofo 7: Attractive Corn Chowder

So, the corn chowder came out really, really good. We boiled the cauliflower florets until they were mush, pureed them in the food processor, and added them back to the water to make a nice, thick stock. We chopped up the fresh corn in the food processor until it was mealy, then added that too. We also roasted on ear of corn so we got some nice carmelized whole pieces. We added a bunch of spices and then just let it cook down a while until it was a good consistency. After that, we added some sliced scallions and served it in Panera bread bowls. I think the goal of making it more attractive (and just generally more successful) than last time was achieved several times over.

Passover Seder

I went to a seder at my church tonight and it was awesome and beautiful in so many ways. I made my first vegan matzo ball soup with this recipe and it turned out really nicely. I wanted the balls kind of dense, and they turned out great, but I might let them fluff out a little bit more next time. Here's the one I made for my mom with rosemary instead of dill, because she thinks dill tastes metallic. I thought the dill tasted lovely.

I have to admit, doing a seder with twenty or so people and only five Jews in the room was a unique experience, but it turned out really great. In a lot of ways it reminded me of my vegan cooking class, where there weren't that many vegans present but a lot of people who were interested and wanted to learn more. Which is great because, in my opinion, most Jewish holidays are all about learning. They're filled with stories and history, and traditions that echo those.

White Bean and Roasted Garlic Soup

I finally made the white bean and roasted garlic soup. This involved a couple of "firsts" for me. For one thing, I'd never made beans before. Sure, I eat beans all the time, but I'd never actually bought the bag, soaked the beans, and boiled them before. I always use canned. The whole process seemed complicated and intimidating, and you have to know in advance that you're going to need that kind of bean? No thanks.

Well, lately my cooking style has changed a lot. Rather than deciding I want to make something and going out and buying ingredients for it, I'm much more likely to stock staples -- things like rice, pasta, and vegetable broth -- and decide what I want to make based on what looks good at the grocery store or what I have on hand. The summer salad I posted a few weeks ago was born of the fact that, even though they're not in season, I spotted some beautiful strawberries that were just begging to be consumed. In this case, I had a bag of great northern beans left over from making the king cake, where I bought the entire bag of beans just to hide one in that monstrous confection. I decided I'd give it a go and see what I could do with them, so I grabbed my cookbooks and landed on this amazing soup recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance.

The process of soaking and cooking the beans could not have been easier. Shout out to my mom for all her advice, because she's awesome. I soaked the beans overnight, then I dumped them in a pot with a bunch of water, salt, pepper, some celery sticks, and about a fourth of an onion just to give them a little flavor. If I were eating them on their own instead of using them in a recipe I probably would have used vegetable broth instead of water. I kept them on a low boil for a couple of hours until they felt and tasted like beans. That's it. Then I divided them into tupperwares and froze what I wasn't going to need right away. I think I can easily do this every couple of weeks, and then I'll always have some beans on hand that I can thaw out and use.

The recipe also involed another first: roasting garlic. This, also, was surprisingly easy. I cut off the tops of the heads to expose the cloves and set them on a cookie sheet. I sprayed them with oil and baked them about 40 minutes at 350. That's literally all it takes. Veganomicon suggests wrapping them in foil, but I didn't and they turned out fine.

The soup itself was also pretty simple. Beans, onion, vegetable broth, fresh sage leaves, salt and pepper, a bay leaf, and some celery seed which I substituted for the fennel seed that the recipe called for. I boiled all that for a bit, added the roasted garlic, pureed it with the immersion blender, and squeezed in half a lemon. While everyone is nuts over immersion blenders, I think for pureed soups I prefer the regular blender just because I like the supercreamy texture. This one was nice a little chunky, however, because it sort of had a rustic edge to it. The little croutons are just a sliced hard baguette that I brushed with oil and stuck in the oven. They made awesome dippers.