culinary expertise, and a moose

Yeah, while my rock star cousin Emily is advancing through the rounds of the Project Food Blog Challenge, I have been asked to share the recipe for some soup I made this morning for a fall harvest potluck. Without Further Ado, I bring you…

Curried Butternut and Kabocha Squash Soup

• a butternut squash (a big one)
• a kabocha squash
• olive oil
• 1 T +1 t curry powder (McCormick’s finest…)
• chicken stock – organic, the kind that comes in a box
• hazelnuts
• Odwalla Mango Tango
• a blender
• a food processor

[ Pre Cooking Prep: Decide to attend a potluck gathering at the home of friends who live over an hour’s drive away. Decide to make something involving butternut squash, since you’ve already bought 18 of the suckers from your CSA and they’re living in the basement, multiplying when you aren’t looking. 

Blow off deciding what you’re going to cook until about 9:00 pm the night before, whereupon you realize that the potluck starts at noon…not at oh, say 5:00 pm the way you thought it did. Determine that this will not affect your morning run, no, it will not, dammit.  Get up at 7:45 am and run for six miles. Come into the house, all stinky and sweaty.]

Actual Cooking Instructions

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Cut the butternut squash in half, separating the bulby end from the skinnier end. Turn the skinnier end on its side and cut it in half, the long way. Cut the bulby end in half and scoop out the seeds. Brush some olive oil onto a cookie sheet and plop the four pieces of squash on it face down.

Cut the kabocha squash in half. Good luck with this, since a kabocha squash is larger than your head. Scoop out the seeds, shove butternut squash over to the side, and put the kabocha face down on the tray as well. (The kabocha is not for the soup, it’s to have with dinner later on. No sense wasting propane and time, let’s just roast it now.)

Let ‘er rip for about 35 minutes. [Don’t shower in the interval. Goof off on the internet. BEEP! Is that the oven timer? Whoops, where did the time go!?]

Trying not to burn yourself, scoop out the freakishly hot butternut squash into the blender. Try to avoid letting little pieces of squash skin get in there. Pour about half the box of chicken stock over it and dump about a tablespoon of curry sauce on top. Blend, blend, blend.

Remember belatedly that curry spices don’t really release their flavor until they are cooked. 

Run a handful of hazelnuts in the coffee grinder and dump that in as well. Add more chicken stock. Try not to panic. Using the logic that God gave you, add more curry powder – say, another teaspoon or so. Add about a quarter cup of husband’s super expensive treat beverage – “Mango Tango” – and blend that in as well.

Pour contents of blender into a soup pot.

Observe how little soup this makes. 

Frantically scoop the kobocha squash – a vegetable you have heretofore never encountered, let alone tasted – out of its blisteringly hot skin, and into the food processor, along with a ladle or two of the soup from the soup pot. Pulse til it’s a sickeningly thick texture of glop.  Dump glop into soup pot. Ladle any remaining chunky bits back into food processor to try and even out the texture a little. Add another shot of Mango Tango. Add almost the rest of the box of chicken stock. Sigh heavily. Dump food processor contents back into soup pot.

By now you should have a soup pot filled with disturbingly orange glop, a dirty blender, a dirty food processor, and a dirty roasting tray filled with mangled squash skin. Ideally, you should have little pieces of squash skin on the counter, in your hair, and possibly on the floor as well. You should have used up almost, but not quite, all the box of chicken stock. “Not enough to use,”…as George Carlin would say…”…better put that back.” That’s right, put the almost- empty-save-for-a-couple-of-tablespoons-of-chicken-stock back in the fridge. Leave the rest of the mess on the counter.

Put lid on soup pot.

Don’t shower. It’s key that you not shower. Run upstairs, change into normal clothes, kiss your husband goodbye, grab soup pot and ladle, hop in the car, and drive to your friend’s house. Heat up the soup on her stove, hoping that this counts as “cooking” and that the flavors will meld.

Now, the REAL way to do this would have been…

1. roast the squash and when it’s done, let it cool down
2. saute the curry in butter or olive oil for a few minutes along with a handful or two of finely diced onion
3. add the cooled-down squash
4. add the stock/Mango Tango, bring it up to a simmer for at least 20 minutes
5. blenderize it
6. dry-roast the hazelnuts in a skillet for 5 minutes, peel the flaky skin off, and chop finely; add to soup at the very end.

Oh, right – pictures. From left, Arianna, Elizabeth, and me.

 

 

In other news entirely, I came across some guys in the parking lot of the grocery store on my way home from Arianna’s. They’d just bagged a moose yesterday morning over in New Hampshire. My preferred way to see a moose is in the wild, and not on the back of a trailer in a parking lot.

But I figured, when else will I get such a close-up view of one of these beautiful animals?

Warning: dead moose pictures below.

They got it on a logging road about a quarter mile from a paved road, in Pittsburg, New Hampshire. Pittsburg is about as far north and east as you can get before you’re in either Canada or Maine – it’s a haul from here. They came across it immediately (they’d been told that one had been seen hanging out on the logging road) and dropped it immediately. Once they gutted it – they left the innards for coyotes – they had to get it out to the road. That was the hard part – as they learned later, it weighed in at 880 pounds (after the organs were removed). The Fish and Game guy said it was 5.5 years old.

They’re taking it to be butchered tonight. I thought of my soul-sister Michele – she of the turtle rocks – and how she butchers her own antelope and elk. It seems to me that’s the way to do it – if you’re going to eat another sentient being, at least have the balls to do the job yourself. Yes, this is coming from a woman with a package of skinless boneless chicken breasts waiting for her in her car as she takes these pictures.

Back to the moose. It had a really unusual right antler. Do you see how it folds? The left antler didn’t do this. I haven’t been able to figure out why this would happen.

If you have ever had the privilege of seeing a moose, you will know just how enormous they are.

These are its back legs. My hand is spread over its back right foot – it’s lying on its right side, so its head is down there, beyond the woman carrying the toddler.

Here is its left antler – no folds. Can you believe it grew all this just this year?

Anyway, I was relieved to hear that the guys who got it plan on eating it. Otherwise, there would be no point to this kill other than vanity and blood sport, of which the world has no lack.