Butternut squash and leek soup, cheese crackers

This is why the vegetables are roasted first.

Odds and ends of chicken parts, how macabre, I'm pleased to have them out of the freezer. I have chicken broth but I want to get rid of these. Pressure pot makes quick work of it.

Here is where the Cuisinart shines, just load it up and let it run for five minutes but I did not drag out that heavy thing. The immersion blender does a less thorough job of it due to all the fiber to process and the volume. I don't care about the mixture being smooth as silk. I don't mind if some of the fibers remain. 

Taste-tested this and decided it needs substantial increased body, the type that butter provides.

And dry vermouth.

This changed the delightful butternut squash sweetness to noticeably less. Sweetness returned with mere teaspoons of brown sugar.

Crackers turn out damp like bread. They're returned to the oven and reheated but not baked and cooled in series repeatedly (three times) until they are completely dry, light, and crisp. 

My oyster crackers are square and they're cheese-flavored. 

One pint of soup.

Two tablespoons heavy cream drizzled around.

Cinnamon is great but it discolors the soup. It's good sprinkled on top. So is nutmeg. Chile flakes would be good, any kind of chile powder. The natural taste is sweet, the mixture can accept any number of serious adjustments. I was considering parsnips, carrots, and celery, and this time the full range of herbs is omitted. The rest, the bulk of it, can be changed to anything with tomato, avocado, tahini, peanut butter, fennel, chicken, bacon or ham, cilantro, mint, basil, cheese, citrus, anything. 

Butternut squash, parsnip, leek soup with duck

This is a repeat of the soup made a few days ago. It is the best soup I've ever eaten. It was gone too fast. I was happy to eat it every day, yay more supremely excellent soup, but then forlorn when it was gone so I made it again. 

That this is not the most famous soup in the world proves just another of those inexplicable harsh injustices that occur on a massively confused world.

Vegetable roasted with duck legs and thighs. Everything smeared around in rendered duck fat once it gets going.

Boiled together in real chicken broth, that is the key right there, and with favorite spices. 

Duck legs and thighs removed and shredded. The thick vegetable mixture puréed, shredded duck added back. 

Duck and butternut squash soup

Gather 'round little darlings, collect yourselves. Let me help you out of your suffocating plastic wrappers there. 

There. Doesn't that feel better?

))) whap (((

Roasted. Why? To impart layers of flavor. 

By heat and by time starches denature to less complex sugar that caramelizes, the whole lot undergoes Maillard reaction and that contributes depth and complexity by layering vegetable flavors. It makes the difference between a superficial soup and one with depth and mystery and full-body satisfaction. That is my opinion and I'm sticky wicket.

I'm already finished with a large bowl of this soup and I want MOAR!

I walked back to Tony's for chicken stock. I was hoping for cartons and they do have them there. A nice selection too. They are all about $4.00 or $4.50 thereabout, I think. 

Tony's also has frozen broth I noticed but I mistook beef for chicken and got the price wrong. I thought it said $6.90 something like that, and I decided to go for it. But I was wrong, chicken is half that.

I met a woman right there and mentioned all this. She latched on conversationally eager to engage. She mentioned something about a television show, America's Kitchen, I think, and I responded with a similar anecdote. Then she went on about meringue cookies, showed them to me and other items in the specialty aisle and followed me around where I pointed out the duck legs on the way to the checkout. We puzzled over that and I bought more but she did not. Some salesman, I.  

This chicken broth of theirs that comes frozen is an excellent deal. It is the base of this soup. If I had used water the soup would be wan. 

You'd think the strong flavors would be the thing that makes all the soup-satisfaction, duck, roasted garlic, habanero, and they do, but without the base of stock they are all just various flavors in suspension and in faint competition. They never do manage to satisfy and you cannot add enough salt or MSG to compensate.

So for a vegetable soup first start with vegetable stock, that is the same thing in concentration to provide the soup a backbone as it were around which cooked vegetables are packed to provide body. That is, layers of vegetable flavors, roasted, boiled, and fresh. 

Man is this good. I feel guilty, actually, for eating the whole thing and not sharing. I have a whole pot and it is mine, mine, mine, all mine. 

I walked down to Tony's twice for this soup. I earned it.

Butternut squash soup

Now with improved plated dish! ↑

Kind Sir, if you would be so gentlemanly, would you please allow me to cut you in half?

Select the largest, sharpest, most menacing knife you own. This isn't a job for sissies.

Rub with oil and roast. The sweet potatoes are for something else later. Although, they could do no harm here.

While that was going on ↑, and before they're removed from the oven, start up whatever else you intend for this soup. In this case, I was going for full-on forest/harvest type flavors. Mine would have leeks, garlic, shitaki and portobello mushrooms blended in, with cubed russet potato and corn not blended in. It would include bay and sage because I have them, thus the color change from bright orange to olive green. The base is chicken stock, but it could just as easily be vegetable or beef.

These were the dirtiest leeks I've ever seen in my life. They took quite a scrubbing.

Leeks, mushroom, herbs cooking in a pot

Roasted butternut squash brought together with cooked leeks and mushrooms, processed in a Cuisinart. My Cuisinart bowl leaked all over the place. That wasn't unusual, I always make a mess, but this seemed different because it wasn't topped off. I looked closely at the apparent source of the leak and wiped it. It leaked again. Peering even more closely I could see a crack in the bowl. Mah dadgum Cuisinart bowl gone 'n got itself cracked! So I ordered a replacement for it on Amazon, because a cracked Cuisinart bowl is absolutely unacceptable! What does it think we're running over here, some kind of romper room?

Loosen with chicken broth if you must. After this processing in the Cuisinart, or blender, or immersion blender, or hand mill, whatever you've got, the smooth thick mixture is returned to the original cooking pot in which the leaks and mushrooms were sweated and softened. Chicken broth is added to the desired viscosity, and the whole shebang cooked until the cubed potatoes are softened. Frozen corn was added because I was going for an Americanized thing here: squash, potato, corn. I almost diced a fresh tomato on top for an American Yankee Doodle decoration and additional color, but I was getting tired and a little bit lazy.

The cream added at the end imparts a wonderful silkiness and transcendent mouthfeel. You don't need much. The nutmeg was just a natural impulse, it always goes with things like this, and anything with cream in it. I could have also added allspice, cinnamon, clove, the usual holiday suspects, but I omitted those in favor of a trace of cumin, which is an outlier spice for a dish like this, but I don't care, it's the kind of incomprehensible impulse that makes my own personal touches so unpredictable and unreplicatable. ←I made up that word. I was surprised with the sweetness of this considering all I did to wrench it into the savory realm and away from the world of sweetness and light. I didn't add anything sweet to it at all. I'm guessing that roasting the butternut developed its own sugars. Whatever. It is absolutely delicious beyond anything I expected. Kids would like this, especially if it was kept bright orange or yellow, meaning, by not adding anything with chlorophyl as I did and avoiding stronger or deeper spices, as I am prone to become carried away.

If you think this doesn't make a proper mess of your entire kitchen then all I have to say to you is, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

[I praised the Lord for the invention of dishwashers, but He said, He didn't have anything to do with that.]