butternut squash soup

Now with improved plated dish! ↑

Kind Sir, if you would be so gentlemanly, would you please allow me to cut you in half?

Select the largest, sharpest, most menacing knife you own. This isn't a job for sissies.

Rub with oil and roast. The sweet potatoes are for something else later. Although, they could do no harm here.

While that was going on ↑, and before they're removed from the oven, start up whatever else you intend for this soup. In this case, I was going for full-on forest/harvest type flavors. Mine would have leeks, garlic, shitaki and portobello mushrooms blended in, with cubed russet potato and corn not blended in. It would include bay and sage because I have them, thus the color change from bright orange to olive green. The base is chicken stock, but it could just as easily be vegetable or beef.

These were the dirtiest leeks I've ever seen in my life. They took quite a scrubbing.

Leeks, mushroom, herbs cooking in a pot

Roasted butternut squash brought together with cooked leeks and mushrooms, processed in a Cuisinart. My Cuisinart bowl leaked all over the place. That wasn't unusual, I always make a mess, but this seemed different because it wasn't topped off. I looked closely at the apparent source of the leak and wiped it. It leaked again. Peering even more closely I could see a crack in the bowl. Mah dadgum Cuisinart bowl gone 'n got itself cracked! So I ordered a replacement for it on Amazon, because a cracked Cuisinart bowl is absolutely unacceptable! What does it think we're running over here, some kind of romper room?

Loosen with chicken broth if you must. After this processing in the Cuisinart, or blender, or immersion blender, or hand mill, whatever you've got, the smooth thick mixture is returned to the original cooking pot in which the leaks and mushrooms were sweated and softened. Chicken broth is added to the desired viscosity, and the whole shebang cooked until the cubed potatoes are softened. Frozen corn was added because I was going for an Americanized thing here: squash, potato, corn. I almost diced a fresh tomato on top for an American Yankee Doodle decoration and additional color, but I was getting tired and a little bit lazy.

The cream added at the end imparts a wonderful silkiness and transcendent mouthfeel. You don't need much. The nutmeg was just a natural impulse, it always goes with things like this, and anything with cream in it. I could have also added allspice, cinnamon, clove, the usual holiday suspects, but I omitted those in favor of a trace of cumin, which is an outlier spice for a dish like this, but I don't care, it's the kind of incomprehensible impulse that makes my own personal touches so unpredictable and unreplicatable. ←I made up that word. I was surprised with the sweetness of this considering all I did to wrench it into the savory realm and away from the world of sweetness and light. I didn't add anything sweet to it at all. I'm guessing that roasting the butternut developed its own sugars. Whatever. It is absolutely delicious beyond anything I expected. Kids would like this, especially if it was kept bright orange or yellow, meaning, by not adding anything with chlorophyl as I did and avoiding stronger or deeper spices, as I am prone to become carried away.

If you think this doesn't make a proper mess of your entire kitchen then all I have to say to you is, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

[I praised the Lord for the invention of dishwashers, but He said, He didn't have anything to do with that.]