I love both these soups. They make great fall and winter main dishes — perhaps with a chunk of good cheese, and some bread — though you could easily serve either one as a welcome dinner or appetizer any time of year.
Tl;dr pre-emption:
1: Easy soup (more savory) — Roasted Pumpkin Soup with Black Pepper Croutons (pictured above — can be vegetarian if vegetable stock is substituted for chicken). From Chez Panisse Vegetables.
Pumpkin, stock, garlic, thyme, bread chunks for croutons, butter, [salt] and pepper.
2: Even easier soup (a sweeter one) — Butternut squash soup (vegetarian)
Butternut squash, onion, butter, thyme/sage bouquet, water. From the Oakland restaurant Pizzaiolo.
Don’t forget to tell us what’s for dinner at your house!
A small disclaimer on squash soups:
My Mom and brother both told me they did not like a squash soup they were given. I recently tried a Trader Joe’s boxed squash soup that was given to my brother, possibly by the same person, and I hated it — cloying, I think is the word. These are nothing at all like that soup.
The soups:
1: Roasted Pumpkin Soup with Black Pepper Croutons
Chez Panisse is with some frequency called the best restaurant in the US. Alice Waters, in founding the restaurant, started the “best, local, seasonal ingredients, simply prepared” movement that is now commonplace across the country. Mr pixxer and I celebrate birthdays ending in zero at Chez Panisse, ever since pixxer-MIL proposed going there for Mr pixxer’s 40th (they paid). It’s that kind of place. Since we can’t afford to go there often, we instead use a lot of cookbooks by Alice Waters and subsequent Chez Panisse chefs.
To me, gourmet food doesn’t mean fussy food — it means exquisite-tasting food. Both these soups qualify in my book, despite [or maybe because of?] their simplicity.
Ingredients:
For this soup, you need one smallish sugar-pie pumpkin — about 3 pounds. You need two sprigs of thyme, four cloves of garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. You need a quart or liter of stock — the recipe calls for chicken, but I’m sure a veggie stock could be substituted. [The taste of the soup depends hugely on the stock used, so if you typically make your own stock, each batch of soup may be different. I’m fond of plain ol’ Swanson’s canned chicken broth, and have actually found it works well for me in this soup (don’t tell Alice). I buy the big 6-cup cans and freeze 2 cups for other use.] The croutons are essential, so you also need bread that you can cut up into 1/2” to 3/4” pieces (neatness doesn’t count), as well as butter and pepper (again). This is an excellent way to use up bread that has gotten a bit old and dry (but not stale). In fact, I cooked this soup on this particular day in order to use up the end of such a loaf.
Making the soup:
Preheat your oven to 350F. Split your pumpkin in half. I split it top-to-bottom, because the two halves will fit onto my small-oven tray that way. Remove the seeds and scrape away the pith as well as you can (into a small bowl, rather than the compost, if you also want to make a little snack later — see below). I think scraping out the pumpkin is the hardest part of this soup. There must be a pumpkin-scraping-out tool out there somewhere...
Rub “the cut sides” with olive oil. I have always taken this to mean both the flat edges that you actually cut, and also the scraped inside of the pumpkin. I use probably ½ Tbsp oil per half pumpkin, though I’ve never measured. Salt and pepper the insides of the pumpkin “generously.”
Place the pumpkin halves, cut sides down, on your baking sheet, tucking one sprig of thyme and two cloves of garlic — still in their “paper” peels — under each half of the pumpkin. Bake 45 minutes or until the pumpkin flesh is very soft.
*
[Coping with formatting challenges :) ]
*
When the pumpkin is cool enough to handle, scoop out the pulp or peel the skin off the pumpkin. Place the pulp into a saucepan where you can mash it quite thoroughly with a masher. Also pop the four garlic cloves out of their skins and mash them along with the pumpkin. Compost the thyme. [The texture is not silky in this soup, so using a Cuisinart or blender would change it a lot. I’ve never tried this.]
Add the stock to the mashed pulp, mix, and reheat.
You’re done.
Except...
Making the croutons:
These can be prepared while the pumpkin roasts, and cooked in the same oven. Cut your bread — either dry or fresh bread — into 1/2” to 3/4” chunks. “Toss them in melted butter,” says the recipe. I melt the butter in a small pan and then toss the bread in that. For maybe 1 cup of bread (recipe: 4 slices) I used 2 Tbsp of butter. I didn’t say this was health food.
Place the buttered bread chunks on a baking pan in “moderate” oven (lo and behold, there’s a 350F oven just waiting for them!) and cook till rather dark brown. With dry bread this can take about 15 minutes, but set a timer for 10 and check on them. Fresh bread will take longer. [A toaster oven can be super fast so beware.] Grind pepper over the croutons as soon as they’re removed from the oven.
Try not to eat all the croutons before the soup is ready. Unused croutons from the first serving can be stored, after completely cooled, in an airtight container on the counter.
*
Serving: [Photo at top of diary.]
The one lesson we learned pretty early on is to wait till everyone’s at the table and the soup is cool enough to eat before topping it with croutons, so that they don’t get soggy while waiting. I just put a portion of croutons into a small bowl for each diner and they can shake them on when they’re ready. Also, taste the soup during the final boarding process to see if it needs more salt, since “salt and pepper generously” is rather vague. (The recipe also offers the option of adding unsalted butter during the final heating for a richer soup, but I’ve never tried this.) Enjoy!
Optional Snack:
We now move to The Victory Garden Cookbook by Marian Morash. This is an oldie-but-goodie we call “The Joy of Vegetables” b/c it serves sort of the same purpose as the original Joy — basic recipes for how to cook pretty much everything, so long as the “everything” comes from your vegetable garden.
I used to think of roasting the pumpkin seeds as a sort of hippie obligation, but then, every time I eat them I realize how yummy they are. Kind of addictive, in fact.
The first part is fun for the residual kindergartener in each of us: with your fingers, skoodge the pumpkin seeds out from the pith and place them in a bowl. DO NOT wash the seeds. I think this is part of why this recipe is so tasty.
When the pumpkin halves come out of the oven, turn the temperature down to 250F. For each cup of seeds (a 3-lb pumpkin yields about a cup), mix in ½ tsp salt and 1 Tbsp
unopinionated oil (we use peanut b/c we have it; corn would do well, too). Not olive, is the apparent message. But then, what the heck, it would just be a different taste. The recipe allows up to double this much salt but my experience is that the minimum amount (given here) was perfect.
Mix the seeds well with the oil and salt, and spread on a baking sheet, in as close to one layer as you can conveniently create. Bake 1.25 hours or till the seeds are dry. These, too, can be kept in an airtight container after they cool, if there are any left to keep.
2: Butternut Squash Soup
This a sorta-recipe. I’ll tell you what I do. This soup is easier to make than the pumpkin soup. Whereas the pumpkin soup is savory, this soup is on the sweeter end.
The backstory is a pretty good one. pixxer-FIL took the family to the Oakland restaurant Pizzaiolo — excellent pizza, cool space. [Back section quieter — go there.] I ordered butternut squash soup as an appetizer, and it was superb! — delicate, smooth — a real luxury dish. I walked over to the pizza oven and told the chefs there how wonderful the soup was, just b/c it was and I wanted them to know I appreciated it. Ready to return to my table, on impulse I joked “You wouldn’t want to tell me how you make it, would you?” “Sure,” one of them said, and then proceeded to rattle off the very simple instructions. After thanking him profusely, I rushed back to my table, and said “Pencil! Paper!” Mr pixxer provided same and I scribbled down what the chef had said, into Mr p’s writing-everything little pocket pad. Then I didn’t ask him for it for too long, and by the time I did, some of the pencil was worn away. This is what remained (stars are replacing the smoodged part), long since typed up:
Yellow onions — cook slowly — lots of butter
Add chunks of butternut in 3/4” pieces.
Cook slowly ***
Stew it.
Add water to cover; bouquet of thyme and sage.
Puree when done.
Was topped with creme fraiche and some oil.
I did say to the chef, “No stock??” but immediately realized the stock is the onion plus butter with the herbs for added flavor. The soup is inherently vegetarian.
Ingredients:
One butternut squash. One onion. Both large, both medium, or both small — whatever :) If a normal-ish squash, then one stick butter. With a teensy (1.3lb) squash recently I used ½ stick and that was fine. Water. A bouquet of thyme and sage. Possibly salt — taste and see. The butter provides enough salt for my taste. (See also “serving” below for optional garnishes.)
Making the soup:
Peel and dice the squash. (Carrot/potato peeler works [Tx to WFD suggestion.] Knife works, too, but is dangerous (squash is hard) unless you cut away from yourself onto a cutting board. [Just yesterday I was actually saying to myself, while cutting a similarly-hard sausage, “Fingers out straight on top of knife. STOP! A thumb is a finger!! ]
I start by cutting the squash into its two logical parts; I think it’s easier to peel each of them separately.
Peel and dice the onion. Neatness doesn’t count — you’re going to puree these. Melt the stick of butter in a large saucepan (I use a 4-quart Dutch oven for an average-sized butternut and large onion). Add the onion and cook slowly. As the chef said, “Stew it.” When the onion is very soft, but not browned, (could be 20 minutes — in fact, you could dice the squash while the onion cooks) add the diced squash and cook slowly some more, till the squash is soft (could be another 20 minutes).
Add water to cover. Don’t be minimalist here - I tried making the soup really thick and concentrated once and it was not as nice. It should be delicately thin, though not watery. Let’s go with “velvety” as a description :)
Add a bouquet of a couple of thyme branches and a sage branch or a few large sage leaves. Bring to a boil and then simmer perhaps another 20 minutes. Remove the herbs. Blend the soup till it’s smooth. I use my 45-year old Osterizer for this, pureeing in two or three batches, pouring each batch into a second pan after blending. Sorry about the cleanup.
Serving:
Reheat, serve. Pizzaiolo drizzles creme fraiche and a bit of olive oil over the top, but I just serve it plain.
I had some more dried bread this week and made it into croutons, which is how I discovered that the black pepper croutons are not at all right for the butternut squash soup. This soup is rather sweet — butternut, onions, butter — not savory like the pumpkin soup.
*
Thanks for visiting!
What’s for dinner at your house today?
If you have a recipe or other food story you’d like to write up for WFD, please kosmail ninkasi23, or reply to her list of open dates in the comments.