sylke

This is probably going to be the third squash-soup recipe in my "Recipes" saved favorites, but it came out well, it was easy, and most of the ingredients are ones I have on hand most of the time.


Curried Squash-Chicken Soup
1 med acorn squash
1-1.5 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 lg onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, pressed (because I like pressing garlic)
olive oil
1 Tbs curry powder
1 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp powdered ginger
4 cp chicken stock (I used some premade boxed stuff that worked pretty well)


Cut acorn squash in half, place cut side down in a baking dish with about an inch of water in it. Prick the skin. Bake at 400 degrees for half an hour.

While squash is baking, broil the chicken. I cut it into strips so it would cook evenly and seasoned with a little salt and pepper. Let cool enough to break by hand into small pieces, or shred with forks.

While chicken is cooling, sauté onion, garlic, curry powder and ginger in olive oil in a large stock pot. Add the stock and salt, deglazing the pan with it if your curry stuck to the bottom like mine did. Cut the flesh from the now-cooked squash and add to the pot. Simmer for 10 minutes, then either blend with an immersion blender or in batches with a regular blender. Add back in the shredded chicken, and simmer until chicken is heated.



I like having excuses to use the immersion blender--it makes for fun with soup. This turned out really tasty, actually. I'm not sure the ginger's noticeable, another tsp probably wouldn't hurt. Right amount of curry, though. Mebbe I try to plate and photograph at some point. amdiranifani thought fresh rosemary sprigs could work, I don't have any better ideas of how to garnish it, though. I don't have heavy cream to swirl, just some half and half which doesn't seem like it'd quite work the same.

I should find a more generic food icon.

6 lb bone-in lamb leg roast
3 cloves garlic, pressed
Fresh rosemary, guess it was 2 tablespoons chopped.
salt (~1 Tbsp)
fresh ground pepper
olive oil

Preheat oven to 325F. Mix the garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper in a small dish. Rub/coat the roast with olive oil. Massage the seasoning mixture into the roast on all sides. (For this one, I poked a bunch of holes with a paring knife in the fatty side, just to get a bit more of the seasoning to go into the meat.) Place on a roasting pan fat side up. Roast at 325 until the center is up to 145F (for medium to medium rare), approximately 25 minutes per pound. Take out of the oven, let it sit for 10, 15 minutes and the center will go up another 5-7 degrees. Take that into account when timing when to take it out of the oven.

I'm definitely getting a fair bit of use out of those pots of herbs. I think I cut off most of the new growth for tonight's dinner, but there's still plenty of rosemary plant left. I should make something with basil next. While the roast sat, we heated up some of those brown-and-serve yeast rolls and sauteed some green beans in a little olive oil and garlic until crisp-tender.

Too lazy to take pictures before we mauled the roast while carving it. But a little lamb wrapped in a bite or two of roll? Mmm, soooo good.

Went back to my previous recipe last night. This is why I blog my attempts, so I remember what I wanted to try the next time. :)

Changes:
1. Added the onion before the broth. If I'm going to do that, I should have added onion to sautee with the lamb frying -- adding it after the lamb was browned just slowed me down and left the lamb to get perhaps a bit too tough. No noticeable difference in the end, it all melts down anyway.
2. Used 4 cp beef broth so I wouldn't have to put any leftover broth from the Swanson's box back in the fridge.
3. used 4 potatoes, 4 carrots to compensate for having more broth.
4. full tsp of thyme
5. 1/2 tsp garlic powder because I didn't realize we'd run out of garlic until I looked in the drawer.
6. It really looked like it needed something green, so I added some peas.

Notes:
Fry/sautee at 4, simmer at 3. I think the "20 minutes" simmering was from when it comes back up to temp, which, when adding all the broth, took 7-8 minutes. Meat could benefit from more simmering, it was a bit tougher than I'd serve to guests but perfectly edible. Husband said it smelled absolutely incredible when it was just the lamb and onion simmering in beef broth. 1 tsp thyme was a good amount of thyme. Rosemary kinda got lost, not sure it's even necessary. I should be more generous with the salt next time in the flour. I put some, but not a *ton*, and the stew needed more salt. Also, 6 Tb as measured generously with a dinner spoon was way too much flour. Use a real tablespoon next time. And even then, maybe more like a quarter cup of flour instead? Yeah.

Still getting on the Flickr bandwagon, so I'm looking at how to organize photos. I'm trying to figure out the difference between collections and sets. Bold denotes direct quotes from Flickr's FAQ.

Q. How is a collection different than a set? (convenient question!)
A. A set contains photos. A collection can contain sets (or other collections).

Oh, okay, that makes sense, but...

Q. Isn't this just sets of sets? (<-- they're very good at predicting my questions!)
A. Yes, but no. It's better. (<-- but not very good at answering them satisfactorily.)

Yeah. That helps clear things up. Thanks a lot. So what you're saying is...

Collections behave just like sets.
Except...
a set can be in more than one collection, but a collection can only be part of one other collection.

That really doesn't sound nearly as helpful as I'd like it to be.

At this point I'm wondering what kind of crack these folks were on when they designed this whole set-collection notion. What finally occurred to me was if free accounts can make sets only, but pro accounts can make both sets and collections, it started sounding like set vs collection was just a permissions thing in code to distinguish pro accounts. And then it clicked. Java has classes (well, interfaces) called Sets and Collections. When I think in those terms, it makes a lot more sense. Free accounts can make instances of Sets, Pro accounts can also make instances of collections. A Java Collection has to contain objects of only one type. (bluekitsune, I tried to add a photo and a set to a collection, and I can't get just a photo added to a collection -- if you figure it out, can you let me know if it's possible?) Essentially, the underlying code structure is visible to the end user in a way that doesn't seem (to me) appropriate. Bad Flickr, no UI design cookie.

The husband really likes fat in his meals. Enough so that he gets actually grumpy when I make tasty but low fat dinners. He apologizes for it, he feels bad that he can't have the meals I want to cook without feeling satisfied, but the emotional change in him when he just puts a big ol' pat of butter on bread after a lowfat meal is astounding enough that I'm willing to try and find a compromise: healthy ingredients, but with at least some forms of fat for his sake.

Tonight's dinner was Pasta Primavera. Three sources of fat: olive oil, butter, and half-and-half to help form a "light" cream sauce. Relatively speaking, of course. Hey, at least it wasn't like an Alfredo. Despite feeling like I messed a few things up, it came out pretty tasty and satisfying, and I feel like I at least fed the boy his vegetables. This is how I actually made it tonight:

1/2 bunch young/thin asparagus, cut into ~2" pieces
1 yellow squash, cut into slices
1/2 zucchini, cut into spears
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 carrots, cut into thin, 2" slices (kind of like julienne but without the last cutting step)
linguine (maybe a half-box equivalent, we used handmade pasta from Rome [NY])
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp butter
1 cp half-and-half
basil
salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan cheese

Heat olive oil in a large frying pan, medium-high. Sauté the garlic until it just starts to color, about one minute. Assume the water for the pasta is on the verge of boiling because it looks pretty close. Add all the veggies and the butter, season to taste with S&P and basil, and sauté until tender-crisp, about 10 minutes. Realize you were way off on the water, and start to accept that dinner's not going as planned. Pull out meat thermometer to test pasta pot, realize water is still 20 degrees shy of boiling. Pout. Add the half and half to the vegetable pan, let simmer, covered, for another 5 minutes. Decide the water's close enough now, and add pasta. Uncover vegetables, simmer sauce for another 3 minutes to reduce. Turn off burner and hope the sauce will thicken a bit as it cools because it's gonna be another 10 minutes at least on the pasta. Tell yourself that the squash doesn't really look that overcooked. Drain pasta when cooked al dente, plate pasta, then spoon veggies and sauce over pasta. Combine remaining pasta and veggies/sauce into one bowl now that it all will fit. Grate fresh Parmesan cheese over each dish. Realize that actually, the squash doesn't taste nearly as overcooked as you feared. Post to LJ with the recipe as a personal reminder after husband proclaims, "This is pretty good, we can do this again sometime."

NOTES:
Butter can probably be reduced to 1 Tbsp without a notable loss of flavor. Cook carrots and asparagus for 5 minutes before adding the squash, or cut all the squash into spears because the circles cook very quickly. Try a half cup of half-and-half next time instead, there was a lot of "saucy juice" left over, but the boy really enjoyed having extra sauce on his, so maybe that's not such a bad thing to add for his sake.

And don't start the vegetables until the water is honest-to-God boiling because that big pasta pot full of water takes like 20 minutes to heat up even at high heat. You'd think you'd have learned that by now, sheesh.

I should've figured, in this day and age, the Phoenix would be Twittering! *follows*

neatorama today posted some notable graduation speakers and included a few snippets from Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford in 2005. The bit that caught my eye:

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

( Musing about my own job. )

More on the lamb adventures. I'd never made a curry before, and lamb curry seems to be a popular preparation, so I gave it a shot. I haven't taken any pictures, but it looks sorta like a lamb stew. ;) I made it on Friday, so I'm going to write down what I remember before I forget about it completely.

~3 lb lamb leg meat, cut into small chunks (think General Tso's sized chunks)
1 Tbs curry powder, maybe two
4-6 cloves garlic, pressed
1.5 onions, finely diced
salt to taste
1/4 cp olive oil
8-10 small red potatoes, quartered
1 small can tomato paste
1 14oz can chicken broth
sriracha to taste

Heat the oil in a pretty large pan on medium-high. Add the curry powder, sauté for about a minute. Add the onions and garlic, and sauté until the onions are translucent. Add lamb and brown on the outside. Add a healthy dash of salt, tomato paste and chicken broth, and a drizzle of sriracha, depending on how hot you want it. I probably added around a teaspoon or two and there was enough heat that you could taste it but not so much I finished the meal sweating. Cook/simmer on low for about an hour, add the potatoes, and simmer for another half hour, stirring occasionally and adding more liquid if the sauce is thickening up too quickly.

Since we'd just had fried rice the night prior, I served it over couscous instead and it was quite tasty.

Fun fact. A large Dutch oven on the big electric burner set to around 4, 4.5 gets oil hot enough that it melts plastic mixing spoons. And plastic spatulas. The dutch oven has since recovered, but I did have to start completely over with new utensils.

From neatorama:



There are certain chord progressions that just work well. In the same way that there really are no new jokes in the world, there's really very little truly new music that has never shown up in some way before. This may not be the first time I've seen an ensemble do some juxtapositions like this, but it's definitely one of the better times. I'm impressed that the entire ensemble can hold their own parts vocally. That sounds pretty delightfully complex. :)

Remaining lamb in the freezer:

1 shoulder
2 ribs
3 legs
lots of chops

Now I need recipes, hm....