Squash Soup

Sat 17 Mar 2007

Saturday might have been Saint Patrick's day but the closest I got to an Irish flag was the orange of the butternut squash soup that was waiting for me at home when I fled the pub (far too many comedy Guinness hats for me!).

I'd received a couple of copies of Tea Time magazine to review and I'd chosen a curried cream of squash soup from the January/February as experiment number one.

I'm an enthusiastic soup maker (it's so easy and satisfying), so while I couldn't track down yellow squash I made do with the subtly different butternut squash.

I melted some butter and sweated down one onion, finely chopped. I added in my peeled, chopped squash (about 1 1/2 lbs worth) and cooked it for a little while before adding in a pint of chicken stock. I also added a teaspoon of Keen's curry powder and about a quarter of a pint of cream. I left this mix to simmer until the squash was tender and then blitzed the soup with the stab mixer.

To serve, a spoonful of sour cream, a sprinkling of parsley and a handful of grated parmesan cheese, before adding salt and pepper to taste.
The soup was very tasty, although the addition of the sour cream was a bit superfluous. The original recipe had called for a whole pint of cream, which would have been totally over the top, but I did really enjoy the addition of the parmesan.

We served this with a 2004 Dr Unger Gruner Veltliner, Kremstal, Austria (£6.99). We weren't overly impressed with the wine and it certainly didn't go with the parmesan cheese in the soup. The wine did go better with just the soup, but there was just a bit too much acidity that interfered with cream in the soup. We have had gruner veltliners in the past that we've really enjoyed, so this hasn't put us off!

tagged with: butternut squash, soup, gruner veltliner

Stumble It!

Combinations 11: Roast garlic soup with Gruyere

Thurs 14 Mar 2007

Andrew over at Spittoon has asked me to host this month's Combinations. I'm having quite a busy time of it so I knew I wanted to choose something simple to cook but that was going to be an interesting wine matching challenge.

I was also a bit short on inspiration (the first assignment for the Gastronomy course was due in yesterday!), but fortunately Mark Hix and the Independent came to my rescue: roast garlic soup with Gruyere. Soup is easy to make, I love soup, I love roast garlic ... but, my god, what on earth do you drink with it?! I've been thinking about this for a couple of days and still haven't come up with any good ideas ... I'll have to invest some more time thinking about it!

Anyway, here is the recipe to get you thinking ...

Preheat oven to 180C, halve 2 bulbs of garlic and roast for about 40 minutes.

Melt butter and gently saute 2 onions (peeled and finely chopped) until they are softened. Add 1 1/2 tbsp plain flour and stir well before adding 1.5 L of hot stock, continuing with the stirring. Season and simmer for about 20 minutes, before adding the roast garlic (peeled of course!) and simmer for another 30 minutes. Blend until smooth, correct seasoning and serve, sprinkling grated Gruyere on top.

I imagine I'll be serving this with some good bread ... but what wine?

Because I'm posting this quite late I'll make the deadline Monday 2 April - just to allow another weekend to squeeze in the soup making!

tagged with: combinations, garlic, soup

Stumble It!