This frigid Valentine’s weekend in Madison is also the Garden Expo. I went to demo soups, from the two MACSAC (Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition) now CSA Fairshare, cookbooks, From Asparagus to Zucchini, and Farm-Fresh and Fast.
Rach is here, so she came along to be my lovely assistant.
It went quite well. I talked about making veggie stock, both as a way to use up those limp veggies in the bottom of the vegetable bin in your fridge, and customized stocks, designed for the dish that you are making, a la Mark Bitmann (and many others). I demoed making one of those customized stocks, based on the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for Silky Butternut Squash Soup, that I have always liked. You sauté the seeds and strings that you’ve removed from the squash in the bottom of your steamer, then add water, and steam the squash above the sauté – so the juices from the squash drip down to enrich the stock. A plus is you use all the part of the squash; you’ll feel better using organic or homegrown squash to do this! I used Megan’s rice cooker to demo the stock. Then I made Kabocha squash soup from Farm-Fresh and Fast (p. 13). It’s a pureed soup where you cube up all the veggies, and cook them in stock and other liquids, and then whiz with an immersion blender or food processor or regular blender. Rach had the smart idea that I should cook the soup at home – not relying on my almost as old-as-me Farberware electric Dutch oven to do the job onsite – and I figured that I could cook it to the immersion blender point. As usual, Rach was right, and that pre-cooking made the demo go much more smoothly. The Farberware got the soup plenty hot enough to serve as samples. Then I talked about making – and showed the ingredients for – Portuguese Stone Soup from From Asparagus to Zucchini (p. 45). I gave everyone lots of tips about substitutions – like I didn’t go buy a bottle of Calvados for the squash soup – I just used Korbel, and since the soup called for cooked apples anyhow, I put the apple cores into the stock to apple it up a bit more. And using canned tomatoes (or frozen from last summer) in the stone soup, instead of fresh, in the middle of winter.
Squash, apples, and sage for soup
I had toppings and swirl-ins for the creamy soup – creme fraîche, chopped fresh sage, toasted sliced almonds, and spicy tofu cubes (working on writing up my recipe here; it’s a variant of Lottie & Doof’s variant of David Lebowitz, wh evidently adapted it from yet someone else.
Afterwards, we discovered that the home vermicomposting guy was following us. We’d had to wait for the pruning demo lady to pick up all her twigs so we could get the stage set up for the soup demo. So, we were super glad that we had twigs before us, and worms after.
We only had one minor disaster – spilled the squash stock in the back of thr car when we got home – not on the way, which would’ve been far worse. And it wasn’t that bad to clean – the floor mat is drying in the basement now. We salvaged enough of the squash to have squash cubes with tofu cubes and creme fraîche and chopped fresh sage and toasted sliced almonds for lunch. Seemed like only one of my jokes went flat – I asked the crowd how many of them got a CSA box, to ask if they were missing the fresh produce, now in winter – and only like 2 people raised hands. Duh, it’s the Garden Expo – they all grow their own – so I hastily amended my question.
Still in squash mode, I made pumpkin muffins with dried cranberries and chocolate chips (I thawed out some squash puree for the demo for in cases). They’re good but sticking to the papers – don’t know if the muffins are too low fat or if the papers are a bad batch.
Pumpkin chocolate chip cranberry muffins
