Curried Squash Soup
We ate really well at our house this week, thanks to Mark cooking lunch for the whole team every day. In the photo below, see his savory curried squash pies with turmeric crust. This was a reboot of a thick curried squash soup from the day before, and a great example of how you can cook a large amount of something, and work it into different dishes all week without getting bored.
Ingredients
Tetsukabuto squash, whole
Cooking oil
Garlic, pressed or chopped
Ginger, grated
Spices you prefer, such as turmeric, cumin, curry paste, etc.
Chicken stock or other liquid (we used like carrot juice and milk)
Pumpkin oil (optional)
Croutons (stale bread cubes and butter to make your own)
Optional, if you want to turn it into pie:
Cream
Eggs
Standard pie crust
Turmeric
Caraway seed
Directions
Cut the tetsukabuto squashes in half and remove seeds.
Oil the squash halves all over and place them cut side down on a baking sheet. Bake at 400 until very soft but not burned — perhaps an hour?
When cool enough to handle, scoop the flesh away from the skin and discard the skins. Mark uses a rubber spatula to do this.
Meanwhile, peel and press or chop as much garlic as you like. Grate as much fresh ginger as you like. (I buy huge quantities of organic ginger when I find it on sale and keep it in a ziplock bag in the freezer. If it's organic, I don't bother peeling it, I just grate it on a box grater directly from the freezer.)
Gently saute the garlic, ginger and any spices you like. Mark added a packet or two of the organic curry paste that we are selling in the farm store at this point, and it was delicious. You can do that, or use your own spices — turmeric, cumin, a bit of cinnamon, etc. Toasted and fresh ground spices are always best but do what you have time and patience for! Season with salt and pepper as you go along.
Add the cooked squash.
Now you need some liquid. You could use chicken stock but we didn't have any so Mark used a 50/50 mix of fresh carrot juice and whole milk. That was an unexpected triumph! We should have carrot juice in the share today so you could do the same. We served it quite thick - somewhere between a puree and a soup - but you can thin to your desired consistency. Blend with an immersion blender until smooth.
Correct your seasonings, adding salt if needed.
Simmer gently until flavors are blended and serve. We had some lovely croutons with it - stale bread cubes toasted in butter. We also topped it with a dramatic drizzle of pumpkin oil, an absolutely stunning delicacy that our friend Andy sent us from Austria. When I tasted it for the first time, I wondered where it had been all my life. You don't need it for this soup, but I think you want it.
The next day, Mark remade the thick soup into a pie filling by adding cream and eggs. The pie crust standard is 3:2:1 flour:fat:water by weight but he makes his with a higher fat ratio for a shorter crust. Mark added a sprinkle of turmeric and a small handful of caraway seed to the pie dough — those were a nice little taste surprise. He filled the crust without blind baking it, and baked the pies at 400 °F until the filling was almost firm but not cracked or dry.
