Monday 11 July 2011

52 Recipe Challenge - Week 2.


This week I decided to try something a bit more practical and something savoury.  The recipe I tried this week was a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall one I found on the Channel 4 food website which intrigued me, butternut and nut butter soup. Recently I have mainly been eating soup for my lunch at work but have got stuck into a rut of the same old leek and potato or carrot and coriander soups so I decided to loo for inspiration.  Now, I’m not a stranger to squash it’s good in curries and even better roasted with garlic and cheese so the idea of finding a new use for this vegetable seemed like a good one.

The recipe I’m going to put down isn’t exactly faithful to the original as I don’t like nuts and one of the main ingredients was peanut butter, so I decided to experiment and use hummus instead...

To make this soup you need:

A  Butternut Squash
A large onion or two small ones
A knob of butter (about two knife scrapings)
Two cloves of garlic one chopped, one crushed
A bit of ginger
Some chilli
1 ltr boiling water
2 vegetable stock cubes
A tub of hummus
Salt
Pepper
Lime juice

In the original recipe they include things to top your soup with  such as yogurt; however, I didn’t have any in my fridge to I left this out.

To start off I chopped the squash in half and peeled it.  (I don’t like peeling squash as it isn’t as easy as peeling potatoes or carrots... but it was part of the recipe so it had to be done!)

After peeling the squash I chopped it into smaller pieces and put them in a bowl to one side.

Next I chopped up the two small onions as I only had small onions, once cut up I put a  knob of butter in my saucepan and when that was melted added the onions. I cooked the onions until they went soft.

  In the original recipe it says use fresh chilli, garlic and ginger but I cheated and used lazy garlic, ginger and idle chilli. When making this soup I added a teaspoon of lazy pre-chopped garlic. I mashed another teaspoon of lazy garlic in my garlic crusher, then I added a teaspoon of lazy ginger and a teaspoon of idle chilli and stirred the lot together.

After that had cooked for a few minutes I added the squash, a sprinkle of salt and pepper then put the kettle on to boil. 

Whilst the kettle was boiling I mixed the squash with the onion and spice mix, once the kettle had boiled I mixed my vegetable stock cubes in the boiling water then added it to the rest of the soup. 
  After doing this I turned the heat up and got the soup to boil and then turned it down to simmer and put the lid on so that it covered most of the pan but let some of the steam escape. 

I then left it for about 20 – 30 minutes whilst I washed some pots and started on cutting things up for my tea. When my tea was bubbling away next to my soup I checked on my soup and decided it was time to stop simmering and start blending.  Initially I started trying to ladle the soup from the pan into the blender attachment but then decided against it and poured it all in over the sink incase of spillages.

I then whizzed it in my blender for a few seconds and put it back in the pan.

My next step was to try to combine the hummus and the soup.  I got the hummus out of the fridge and put it in a bowl and tried stirring it with a bit of soup as was the original recipe advised doing with peanut butter, I wasn’t sure if this was quite successful but put it in the pan with the soup anyway.  I tried stirring it lots but it didn’t mix so I put it all back in the blender and it combined.
Once again I transferred the soup from the blender to the pan and heated it through on a low heat, once it looked all bubbly and hot I turned the heat off and added a splash of lime juice, lots of dried coriander, some salt, pepper and chilli to season.

This Suash and Hummus soup tasted different to all the other soups I have made.  Maybe it was because of the experimenting with the hummus or the lack of potatoes as most of my other soups contain potatoes... but it was rich and tasty with a mix of sweet and savoury notes.  The only down side is I may have over done the chilli seasoning a tad as it made my mouth tingle afterwards.  Must remember: chilli is not a seasoning!

Have you tried any new recipes recently? Or do you have any good squash recipes you’d like to share with me?

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