Thursday, October 14, 2010

potato corn carrot squash soup

Ok, I know that sounds like a very busy soup, but in my defense, I wanted to make squash soup, but only had one acorn squash at the time. I did have a bunch of carrots and potatoes, though, and canned corn was on sale. So, I decided to just throw it all in together. It turned out pretty tasty.
Here's a link to the original recipe I started with:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Butternut-Squash-Soup-with-Ginger-15572
And here's what I did:
Ingredients:
1 large acorn squash
2 leeks, on the smaller side, white and light green parts
3 medium-largish potatoes
5 carrots (one was really big, but a couple were small)
1 small head of garlic, it was 4 large cloves
10 cups water
5 veggie bouillon cubes (each cube makes 2 cups broth)
2 cans of corn, drained
1 hot pepper, a thin curly red one
~1.5 tbsp minced fresh ginger
Enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the soup pot.

1. Cut the acorn squash in half. Scoop out the seeds and stringy bits and set them aside. You can toast them up later for a nice snack. Spray the cut ends with cooking spray and put it cut ends down on a baking dish. Cover the pan with foil, and stick it in the oven at 350º for 30-40 minutes, until the squash is soft.

2. Peel and mince the ginger. Peel and mince the garlic cloves. Wash the leeks, remove the outer 2 leaves, cut off the top and bottom. Chop up the leeks. (I sliced them down the middle, then chopped into ~1/8 inch pieces.) Cut open the pepper, pick out the seeds and membrane, and chop into small pieces. Pour some oil in the pot, and dump the ginger, garlic, leeks, and pepper in. Don't turn on the stove yet.

3. Peel and chop the carrots. Peel and chop the potatoes. Open the cans of corn and drain off the liquid.

4. Turn on the stove, and let the the garlic, leeks, ginger, and pepper cook a bit, stirring it around. (Note: I also put some salt in at this point, but it's probably not necessary, as the bouillon has plenty of salt in it.) Add the water and the bouillon. Scoop the squash flesh out of it's skin and plop it into the soup pot. Drop the carrots, potatoes and corn in too. Cover and let it simmer on low for an hour or two.

5. Puree it in batches in a blender. Enjoy with some nice bread. If you toast the seeds, you can also top the soup with them. 


As a side note, I toasted the seeds with olive oil and garlic salt. They were delicious!

3 comments:

  1. negative on the boullion cubes -_-

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  2. Don't know if you can get broth (any kind will do), but just use 10 cups of broth instead of the water and bouillon cubes. Or maybe miso instead of bouillon, if you can get that.

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  3. I made a variation of this without the squash yesterday, and it turned out really tasty. I was out of fresh ginger, so I put some ground ginger instead, and added some thyme and oregano. Turns out that it does need the added salt, as it was pretty bland without it. Oh, and the corn I used was frozen roasted corn, rather than canned corn.

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