www.carolineandtony.com

Serendipitous squash & leek soup

February 5th, 2006 Caroline

I order our produce box on Sunday evening when I’m relaxed and sort of rested and have ambitious plans for a week of home cooking. By the time the box arrives on Wednesday afternoon, I am usually wishing there was a lasagna inside.

So imagine my disappointment when I opened this week’s box and discovered that I thought leeks would be a good idea. Leeks are nice, but they have to be cleaned and chopped and cooked, and to me (and at the risk of bringing the wrath of leek-lovers down on me) they are not much more than onions that go bad faster. Really, carrots are so much simpler. I know of really only two good things to do with leeks (leek & potato soup and sweet potatoes Anna) and I pretty much ate my fill of leek and potato soup in college.

So imagine my delight when Wednesday night I opened the latest Real Simple, the magazine I love to hate (more on this another time; suffice to say right now, I just don’t recognize myself in its pages. And yet, I subscribe.) to find a recipe for butternut squash soup. With leeks! And it tastes really pretty good.

Here it is, with my emendations:

4 leeks
1 3-pound butternut squash
1 bay leaf
3/4 tsp kosher salt
5 c stock
1/4 c shelled raw pumpkin seeds
1 tbsp fresh rosemary
olive oil

By the way, these are the quantities listed in RS’s recipe, but use your best judgment, or what you have on hand. I made the soup with 2 leeks, two squash, and without measuring the stock – I just poured it in until it looked like soup — and it tasted great.

Real Simple suggests peeling the squash (you can do it with a regular vegetable peeler), seeding it, and chopping it into 1-inch chunks. I’m going to recommend another way to deal with the squash, even though I know some people will balk at turning on the oven to make a soup. But this is really easy, and makes a more flavorful soup:

Preheat the oven to 375. Line a jelly roll pan or cookie sheet with a piece of parchment paper, silpat, or simply spray with a little oil.

Halve the squash lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Fill the squash’s cavities with unpeeled cloves of garlic. Depending on the size of your squash, you could probably get a full head of garlic in there. This is a particularly good use for those “fiddly cloves of garlic” as Deborah Madison calls them, that are as much peel as useable garlic. Now drizzle the cut sides and the cavities of the squash with a bit of olive oil, flip the squash onto the pan (cut side down) and roast about 45 minutes or so, until it’s nice and soft. Once it’s out of the oven and cool enough to handle, scoop the squash into your soup pot. You can squeeze the roasted garlic out of its skins into your soup pot too, or squeeze it onto pieces of toast to eat as your reward for cooking your family soup. Your call.

Another digression, regarding stock. Before I had kids, I would have made my own stock for this soup, using the squash seeds and their accompanying scraped-out strings of flesh. You can put them into the soup pot with a slosh of olive oil and a chopped-up celery stalk, a chopped carrot, the leek tops, a bay leaf. Sauté it all for a few minutes, then deglaze the pan with some white wine and then several cups of water. Let it simmer for half an hour or 45 minutes (unlike meat stock, veggie stock doesn’t get better the longer it simmers) then strain and use. But now I have kids and we’re doing well to have homemade soup. I use store-bought stock these days.

Back to the soup.

Slice the leeks (all the whites and the tender greens) into half lengthwise and then into half-circles. Put them into a big pan of water (the bowl of a salad spinner works nicely for this) and let them sit a minute to get all the sand out. Then scoop the leeks into your soup pot.

Add your roasted or raw cubes of squash, the bay leaf, salt and stock. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes or so, until the squash (if you started with raw cubes) and leeks are tender. Remove from the heat, then pick out the bay leaf and puree. Pour the soup back into the soup pot and keep warm till serving.

Meanwhile roughly chop the pumpkin seeds and rosemary. Heat a bit of olive oil in a small skillet and add the seeds and herbs, stirring occasionally, until fragrant (2-3 minutes). Obviously you can skip this garnish, but it’s tasty, and I’ve learned recently that pumpkin seeds are particularly good for you.

Ladle the soup into bowls and sprinkle with the pumpkin seeds and herbs.

Entry Filed under: Recipes