We’re having a bit of a winter like that right now. Biking home this morning, I pedaled slower and slower, and began to realize that had I been going the opposite direction, I wouldn’t even have had to move my feet. It’s coming through cracks in windows, and it’s yelling outside like the worst of pioneer kidnappers. When you find the rare protected street, the weather is almost balmy, until you turn a corner and are reintroduced to the meaning of the words “wind chill”.
Part of the romance of those books for me was the exoticism of needing to store a winter’s worth of food, or starve. I was a strange child, and enjoyed games of desperation and apocalypse scenarios, so I suppose it makes sense that this would have fascinated me. The bizarre, extreme nature of this other lifestyle made my own, snowless Oregon winters seem puny and anemic in comparison. I wanted white Christmases, and I sure as hell wanted to stockpile all the food in the pantry. Maybe I just wanted a smash-bang snowstorm to keep me out of school for a few days. I suppose I’ll never know.
Either way, the romanticism lives on in this particular winter. There are few things that will send me out to brave a bike ride in the cold, but they exist: the need to rent the next season of Alias, a few more bottles of wine, or a trip to the backyard larder for supplies.
Squash Soup with Sage
This soup definitely merits trips to the larder or to the store for ingredients. I mean, really, there's not much better for windy winter days than homey soup ("homely" works well, too; the best soups are straight-up ugly) and a brown bread. The recipe is roughly based off of one from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: I tweaked several things, and didn't really go by the recipe so much as adding milk, vegetable stock, squash, and sage until it poured well and tasted soup-like. Do it to taste, people, extremely to taste. I changed the squash from pumpkin to butternut (although I'm sure the transition back would be just as rewarding). It's not cooked in its own shell (if you read the book, you'll understand why), and being the people we are, we added an entire head of roasted garlic instead of three measly cloves. I'm honestly of the opinion that once you have roasted garlic, there is no actual taste-based limit, only that of how much you can carry home to roast in the first place.
One medium butternut squash (I think we ended up using about a 4-pounder)
1 large head garlic
olive oil for garlic roasting
(about) 1 quart vegetable or chicken stock
(about) 1 quart milk
(about) 1 Tablespoon dried sage
salt&pepper
To begin, roast the butternut squash and the garlic. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Squash first: Split the squash lengthwise, and gut the seeds/stringy seed surrounds. Place into a glass pan, cut sides down, and pour in approx. 1 cup water, or until the squash is 1/4-1/3 covered in water. Cook for at least an hour, until the flesh is tender. Let cool, and remove the flesh from the rind.
For the garlic, cut about 1/2 inch off the top of the head. Place on a baking sheet or small dish, and pour olive oil liberally over the head. Make sure the olive oil gets in between the cloves. Roast until the cloves are tender (it really does depend, I find it usually takes our oven about 20 minutes, but it could be as little as 15 minutes, and as many as 45). Let cool, remove cloves from the papery surroundings.
Puree the roasted squash and garlic together. Deposit the puree into a large pot. Add stock, milk, sage, and s&p until the soup has reached desired taste and consistency.
Photo by the generous and ever-lovely Emily F. Samstag.
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