Roast Butternut and Onion Soup

My sister jogged by for a visit today. Literally jogged -- she lives about a mile away with her husband (you'll be seeing more of them; or more specifically their cooking, because they have a grill and a flair for fancy meat-based dishes, both areas where I am lacking.... oh, and they're both employed, and have promised to feed me occasionally). Anyway, last time she dropped by, I was similarly still employed, and so played hostess as she rampaged through my cabinets. As I recall, she ate half my lunch, drank a big mug of cocoa, and then made off with half a dozen freshly-baked brownies in under an hour. Amazing.

But things have changed. Now I am unemployed and have time on my hands, so when she drops by it's not so much an opportunity for her to pillage my freezer; instead, it's a chance to test out new recipes on an unwitting volunteer. Bwa ha!


First, introducing the main players: my new beloved, the butternut squash, and an old standby, the onion. Other things you'll need for this dish are olive oil, dried rosemary, salt, pepper, and chicken stock. I'm not fussy about the chicken stock, be it liquid or homemade or cubed or in a packet, and I often leave it out of soups that already have meat in them. But in this case, we're using it.

I'm also bringing in spices for this one, though I'm guessing you could mix the spices up with another set and come out with a totally different flavour. I'm using whole cumin seeds, ginger, and sweet powdered curry.

Fire up the oven at the customary 375 degrees and put your stockpot or soup pot on the stove at a low setting. I've used the top half of the butternut squash for this -- peeled it (with a vegetable peeler, even though the skin feels pretty tough), cubed it and put it in an oven-safe dish that will roughly accomodate a single layer. Drizzle with olive oil, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of pepper, and a teaspoon of rosemary needles. Toss everything and stick it in the oven, and set the timer for 25 minutes.

The pan on the stove should be hot now; take about half a teaspoon of cumin and throw those in, then stir until they're toasted a bit (you can tell when the cuminy fumes start wafting up at you, around the 1-minute mark). Tip the cumin seeds into a cup and stash it somewhere you won't knock it over. Put two tablespoons of olive oil into the heated pan, and keep the heat on low.

Food Network-fu the onion (that thing where you cut it in half, then slice it at angles before chopping it up). Once it's diced into pieces, add the onion to the soup pot, give everything a good stir and then cover the pot. This is where all the "keep the heat on low!" stuff gets serious -- you're going to have to keep coming back and stirring the onions to make sure they don't catch and burn to the bottom. The lid on the pot means that they won't fry, but burning's a problem if the heat's too high.

Turn around to discover that your sister has somehow unearthed a bag of mini marshmallows and is steadily devouring them. Cannily make her tea, and wait until she drinks it before saying "Oh, I should have offered you cocoa instead, to have with the marshmallows!" At this point, your sister will not be able to handle cocoa, knowing she's going to have soup and then have to walk home.

Confiscate marshmallows.

Buzzer! Stir slowly-roasting butternut, then reset the timer for another 10 minutes and put it back in the oven. Now stir the onions again. (Feel free to get paranoid about the onions.)

If you have an electric kettle, this is a great time to fill it up (or refill it, depending on your sister) and get it ready for the soup phase of our operation. If you have a stovetop kettle, same deal. Also, pull out all of those spices you kept safely out of reach: toasted cumin, ginger, curry.

At the second buzzer, check the butternut squash to see if it's golden and lovely. We'll assume that 35 minutes of roasting did the trick and you can turn off the oven (if not, repeat in 10 minute increments until satisfied). Spoon the squash into your lovely unburnt onion-filled soup pot and stir everything together, then pour in enough boiled water to totally cover the vegetables. Add in a packet/cube of chicken stock (thriftier than liquid), stir again and cover; at this point you can turn up the heat a tiny bit, just to make sure that the water keeps boiling well.

I hate to waste a hot oven, and soup alone can be a bit dull unless it's got identifiable bits in it (and this one won't, we're pulverizing it), so I toasted some english muffins and then made mini-pizza-things out of them. At left you see the naked muffins, before I found a few slices of cheddar and spoonfuls of this sundried tomato marinade I use instead of ketchup -- it's incredibly powerful, very nice. Once you've figured out what to put on the muffins, stick everything on a cookie sheet and put them on the top rack of the turned-off oven, and while you finish up the soup they'll just nicely melt together.

The muffin topping search-and-recovery mission hopefully took you about five minutes. Now uncover the pot and make sure nothing's stuck to the bottom (if so, your heat's too high, adjust). Add in a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of pepper, a teaspoon of curry, half a teaspoon of ginger, and all of the cumin you toasted. I know these quantities sound miniscule, but most of these recipes are adjusted for a eat one, freeze one plan; if you're married or have a roommate or kids, just assume everything's been made for 2-3 people.


Ironically, at this point I realised that in-pot blending such a small amount in my Le Creuset was probably a recipe for disaster. That's why I tipped everything into a saucepan to continue. And while using my immersion blender, I thought "wow, that certainly creates an odd suction against the bottom of the pot if you hold it the wrong way". And I specifically remember thinking "Hunh, this could get really messy if you're not carefu--- AAAGH!"

Eh, I needed to clean the stovetop anyway.

Once the sister had stopped chortling long enough to set the table, this is what was served. It is VERY filling, especially if you're an idiot and use bowls that are really too big for this job. The sister said that the roasting of the squash was definitely noticeable and appreciated, and I think that's true -- I initially heard of this recipe done with squash just thrown in with the chopped onions, and I suspect that would come out really weak. The onion's not sharp in this at all, but it is present. I was also surprised that a soup with absolutely no dairy in it could come out with the appearance of a cream-based soup! But it was lovely and smoky, and the tomato marinade and cheddar were a nice sharp addition. All in all, not bad for half a squash, an onion, and a spice rack.

...oh, and just in case you don't like onion, you can probably pull this off by using half the onion and just adding a little more squash. I made roast butternut squash soup in much this same fashion last month, and as these two containers show (Twist'n'Loc, my absolute favourite tupperwareish brand ever), you can get quite a different colour of soup by using a different squash-to-onion ratio. And it might also be a good trick to reserve some of the roast squash and stick it back in the soup post-blending, if you're having the soup on its own and want something to get your teeth into.

As with everything, date and freeze the remainder of the meal, preferably in small containers so you can defrost and devour single servings. Ta da!
To the kitchen!

Grocery Shopping

New rule: throwing any sort of food out is failure.

That's got qualification, of course, because eating rotting or moldy food is a health hazard, and if you can't afford to waste food then you CERTAINLY can't afford a trip to the doctor (or worse, that money-hole known as the Emergency Room). So the real failure is purchasing something that goes neglected long enough to decay into a health-hazard state. This is what I keep in mind when grocery shopping these days.


So, at left, this week's haul. It cost me $60, which is partly because I live in an expensive part of the country, and partly because I've just run out of meat in the freezer and wanted to stock up. (I'm set for all dry goods because I do a tri-monthly binge at the surprisingly cost-effective natural foods store up near my parents, and that's why there's nothing like beans or pasta or rice in there.)

There's some stuff I'll cook with that I generally expect everyone's got in their house, like milk and butter and eggs, or sugar and flour. Another thing I've got is a huuuuge spice cabinet; it's sort of absurd. I've just gotten some spice racks, so once I get those up and everything in them, I'll include a post about spices -- at the moment, it's just a confusing jumble of identical bottles.

First up, the veg.

In order of anticipated decay: yellow squash and zucchini, parsnip, carrots, onions, and lastly butternut squash. I "rediscovered" a butternut squash on the bottom shelf of my fridge that had been down there for at least two months, and though bits of it were worse for wear, I was able to salvage a lot of it. This revelation prompted me to vow to have one of these on hand as a constant backup, because it's hugely versatile (steamed, roasted, with feta, in a soup...) and apparently will last forever.

The summer squash and zucchini are much more delicate, so those need to be used soon. Also, I dropped one of the zucchs on the ground as I was transferring all this to the fridge and it snapped in half, so tomorrow? Superbowl Zucchini Bread. Lucky brother-in-law!

What to watch for in the other veg: Parsnips shrivel. Carrots go soggy. And supermarkets have recently gotten REALLY sneaky with bagged onions! I used to pick up a bag without a second glance, but now I've noticed that my local's stopped putting out single onions at all, so you're forced to buy a bag, and then you get home and see that two of the onions have rot on the side or have gone mushy. So go ahead and buy the bag, but check it out in the supermarket before you buy. These ones are fine, but it took me two gos to find a good bag.

In the bowl, we've got a yellow bell pepper, a lemon, and a plastic thingie of lemon juice. The bell pepper is here because I'm thinking of putting part of it in the salad, and also because you can snack on these raw without problem -- they're very sweet. The lemon's here to make a point, namely that if a recipe calls for a lemon's rind or slices of lemon, buy the lemon. Otherwise, think of substituting the plain juice. Yes yes, I know that you're supposed to use fresh squeezed lemon and it's better and all that, but if you're just cooking a basic meal, then buying a tonne of lemons is wasteful if you're just using the juice. Save the real lemon for your hobo cocktails.

The fruit salad, for me at least, is less expensive bought at the salad bar twice a week than it is for me to buy fruit and hope it lasts. I'll eat this in three or four days. I used to go and buy three apples and some oranges and grapes, but I can waste fruit like nobody's business, so I'm trying to figure out how to economise on that front, and this seems to do the trick.

Prewashed salad! Yay! It's $4 a bag at my supermarket, while quite a lot of plain lettuce is about $3. Economizing, it might make mathematical sense to just buy the big bag of lettuce, some tomatoes, bell peppers and cucumber. Eh, maybe. If I could guarantee that I'd make my own salad from scratch every day, then I might be better about buying all the individual bits. Instead, I find that the likeliest scenario for me to eat salad is for it to be the simplest, laziest option. Assembling a salad takes 12 minutes, making pasta takes 9, making a tuna sandwich is 5, but opening a bag of salad and dumping some dressing on it takes less than a minute. And thus I hope to make my laziness work to my healthy advantage.

The celery really should've been in with the other veg, but it sort of fits in the "snack" category where I keep the fruit and salad. Celery's great; very good on its own, better with salmonella-free peanut butter, and most certainly necessary for lots and lots of soups. If you're into soups, then celery (along with the onion and carrot from the previous photo) will form the base for a lot of your cooking.

And here's the last thing: meat.

(Notice the prominence of the Sharpie.)

I pretty much buy meat to freeze. I'm not a vegetarian by a long shot, but I probably eat meat less often than your average person. Milk, cheese, beans, eggs -- those sort of things show up more often than meat in my diet, or I have quite small portions of meat in a mess of vegetables. I don't eat much fish because of an early-life confusion about the role of dolphins in the entire fishing proccess, and I have no good reason for not eating much beef, lamb or venison.

I guess I just really, really hate birds?

But it turns out I might have formed pretty cost-effective eating habits, because now I'm not craving meat (relatively expensive). This week's grocery haul also wouldn't have been very meat-heavy, except that turkey keilbasa and ground turkey were on sale. The Sharpie, which I keep in my utensil drawer, is used to mark the date before I chuck everything in the freezer. When I take the meat out, I tend to mix it with stuff that will then allow me to partially refreeze, like a soup or a pasta sauce or something.

And that's it, other than the impulse buy of York Peppermint Patties, which now has me feeling wired and slightly ill. Blech. I'll confess if I allow any of this to go off, to get a better idea of deadlines on food, but with any luck half of this haul will end up in the freezer, just in altered form.

Again, the point of this exercise will be less "what am I hungry for?" and much, much more "what can I make out of what I have?"
To the kitchen!

Lemon Chicken Packet

Okay, this started off as just regular lemon chicken. But I went grocery shopping today, and -- well, things got out of hand.

First, rediscover your chicken, now thawed through the marvellous magic of putting it in the fridge for 24 hours. Yay! I also discovered that my plan of using the rest of last night's roast vegetables might have a flaw; namely, I've been nibbling on them all day. So there's not much leftovers left. Whoops. Hence the sudden addition of the onion, yellow pepper, zucchini (or "courgette" if you're feeling fancy) and tin foil.

Something in your head is now saying "Wait a second, those flavours don't really go together with sweet potato...." You're right. If you're making this from scratch, then make a cup of rice to replace the roast vegetables. If you're me, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

Alors, to the oven! 375 degrees again, please.



Put this together on a cookie sheet, preferably one with a raised edge (I think some people call them "jelly roll tins"). Lay out a piece of tin foil; you're going to be wrapping this around a chicken breast and lot of veg, so make it big. Take your thankfully-thawed chicken breast and slice a pocket in it. Mix half a teaspoon of salt with half a teaspoon of ground pepper, and rub this all over the outside of the chicken breast AND the inside of the pocket. Take an angled slice of lemon and put it in the pocket, and you're done with chicken-wrangling.

Now get busy with the veg. I cut the zucchini and the yellow pepper in strips, but left the onion a little chunkier. Place another slice of lemon right on top of the chicken, and then pile the rest of the vegetables on top. If you're a salt nut, you might want to sprinkle more on at this point, and this could also be pretty good with rosemary or some other herb. But generally, everything in this is pretty clean and bright, so just having lemon and salt and pepper will keep it that way.

The wrapping is a bit tricky, and one of the big reasons I like doing this in foil rather than in parchment. The easiest way is to bring the longest opposing sides up vertically, so it's almost forming a sling, then roll and crimp down towards the chicken. Then crimp the sides up to make it watertight. However you do it, it should sort of look like this.

Why include that photo of the unused bits? Mostly for thinking. Right now, I'm thinking that the yellow pepper half and the onion half would be really good in an omelette. The zucchini's probably the easiest of the bunch, because zucchini grilled or sauteed with garlic or onion or squash is incredibly delicious as a side. The lemon... I don't know. I'm leaning towards using it to make iced tea. Yeah, it's winter, and yeah I could probably use the lemon for drinks OTHER than tea... Hm. Well, I'll think about the lemon. The omelette's totally happening, though. (Chicken, obviously, can be almost anything, but also needs to be used ASAP, given it's from frozen.)

Hey, 30 minutes is up! Time to de-mummify the chicken....

Tongs are useful things. For one, they will stop you from getting burned horribly by the steam coming off of this packet (wafting, at left). They will also allow you to pick up all the veggie bits out of the lemony chicken juice left at the bottom of the tinfoil. Sadly, the juice is not delicious.

If you forgot to cook the rice, then STOP UNWRAPPING THE CHICKEN! It'll stay hot for a while if still wrapped (see: steam). Go make rice.

Transfer the chicken and bits to a plate. Leave the watery tin foil.

And now you're either ready to eat, or you garnish with the rice of your choice. The chicken is lovely and moist, everything is lemony (though don't bite into the lemon or you'll be sorry), the vegetables are perfectly steamed, and the only thing I'd really think of adding is maybe some sort of garlic. Possibly in the form of garlic salt, because I really can't see how garlic would do well being steamed in a packet. That just seems a recipe for evil.

Anyhow, it's a good base for further experimentation. For obvious reasons, when choosing vegetables to add in, stay away from anything that you can't readily eat raw, like potatoes (though carrots in this could be very nice.... hm). There's a possibility that you could use only the pocket lemon, then do thin strips of carrot and leek with rosemary and some balsamic vinegar.... Hm. Point is, it's relatively easy, pretty inexpensive, pretty damn quick.

And can even look nice, unless you do what I did, which is offensive to the eye (but delicious nonetheless).

Ah, roasted vegetables. You are a blessing and a curse. Check back for a chicken recipe that WILL go with root vegetables later.
To the kitchen!

Roasted Vegetables

Have you seen the employment figures lately? Ha ha ha.... aaaaaugh! Sigh. In tough times like these it's necessary to find other uses for your oven, to prevent you from sticking your head in there and breathing deeply.

As unemployed people, it's also necessary that we make do with what we've got. For instance, the Food Network. The Food Network is awesome and inspiring, but who has pickled red pepper lying around? And at this point, we're not exactly going out to buy it.

Which brings me to root vegetables.

While I was cleaning out the fridge, this is what I found:

One sweet potato
Two red potatoes
Two parsnips (mmm!)
One and a half carrots (?)

This is a pretty typical haul, I think. They're long-lasting veg that I probably bought a week or so ago, and they probably would've lasted in the fridge for a while longer. One thing I did while I was working was do a weekly supermarket run: basically, whatever day I remembered to grab the canvas bag on the way out the door, that was grocery day.

Get chicken... Oh, dammit!

This is why it helps not to be an idiot. Freezing meat is a good thing to do, I think -- long before the Day of the Pink Slip I would buy meat that was on sale (usually because it was within a day or two of its sell-by date) and them immediately stick it in the freezer. Of course, it helps to actually defrost the meat when you want to use it in a meal. Like now. So, chicken goes in the fridge and we're going to just make roasted veggies, and hold half of them over to tomorrow.

Peel everything, though you can pretty much leave the skin on the potatoes -- I just gouge out their eyes! Grrr!

So, back to the theory of impulse grocery shopping: the downside of is that I didn't really make a list before going, and I also tended not to see what I already had in the fridge. Looking back, I realise I was wasting an enormous amount of food, either because I forgot stuff and shoved it back in the fridge or I bought the same item twice. Bad, bad habit.

Chop everything up, dump in cooking dish (this is a Le Creuset cast-iron enameled soup pot, with which I am obsessed).

Add in a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of pepper, a teaspoon of dried thyme and a teaspoon of dried rosemary. Dash in a few tablespoons of olive oil, and mix mix mix.

Oh, you thought I forgot the garlic on the cutting board? I did not! Three cloves of garlic, do the Food Network thing and thwack them with the side of a knife before peeling then and chucking them in with the rest. You can put less in if you're not a fan of garlic. Other things that would be very nice in this? Quartered onion, leeks (wash carefully, full of sand), probably fennel -- you could also use fresh rosemary instead of the dried stuff, but since frugal is currently my watchword, I'm going with dried.

Keep your eye on the garlic when you mix, and try and spread the cloves out a bit. If they bunch up, I don't think the flavour carries through as much. Have I mentioned I love garlic?

Mmmmmm.

Okay, we're good. Stick it in the preheated oven, set an alarm for 30 minutes.

I've done this in a roasting pan before, and it's extremely good. If you like your roasted veg crispier (and more impressive in presentation), then this is probably the way to go. Spray the roasting pan with oil before spreading the mix across it in a single layer -- and when you're cutting the vegetables, make them nice quarter-inch chunks. That way the edges get all brown and lovely. If you do it in a pan like the one I've used, the vegetables are going to stay more moist and only brown in bits. It's also going to look a lot less pretty on your plate.

Once the buzzer goes, take the mix out, stir it up (make sure to get any bits that have browned against the bottom) and pop it back in. Another 30 minutes, and you're done.

Voila! One of the most comforting winter side dishes I've ever known. It's fantastic with lemon chicken, but clearly we're experiencing some technical difficulties on that front, so it'll have to wait for tomorrow. For now, I'm eating half of this now, because it's delicious. So there.

To the kitchen!

The Hobo Kitchen

Welcome, fellow travelers!



We live in a curious age. Money is apparently imaginary, our parents turn ashen whenever someone says the phrase "401k", and our bright shiny future is either gone or on layaway (no one can quite decide yet).

For some of us, this means that we got a nice crisp pink slip for Christmas in 2008. Oh, hooray!

What does this mean? Well, it means a whole lot less dining out, obviously. It means retraining ourselves in how to cook and shop and entertain, and how to do it in the most frugal way possible. Sure, we've got tons of time to watch the Food Network, but that can only get you so far.

I mean, what the hell is a "tablescape"?! And don't you always find there's ONE gourmet ingredient on the recipe that you just plain don't have?

So here's the deal. It's time to stop wandering into the kitchen and thinking "what do I want to eat?" and instead, start thinking "what can I make out of what's already in the fridge?" Time to use our unemployment to our advantage and really get to grips with how to make stuff, rather than reaching for takeout menus. There are some things that are reasonable to splurge on (see: spices), and there are some things that are not (see: Grand Marnier). The freezer is your friend. So are dried and tinned goods.

That's what I'll be doing, anyhow. You're welcome to come along.
To the kitchen!