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.

Cauliflower soup

Cauliflower, potato, and leek soup. The potato is huge. Included carrot for its sweetness. I suppressed the urge to include roasted chile peppers. This time I wanted to try simplicity. I figured I can add chiles at any time I wish in any of various forms. I also nixed cheese. 

Ordinarily the vegetables would be roasted but today I chose not to mess with all that. They were fried in my largest pot as an overloaded stir-fry, added one at a time sturdiest first, which put three garlic cloves last. Garlic not shown. 

By divine intervention that I have not yet bloodied myself with this Blade of Death. I get shivers just looking at it. I am a bit surprised the thing is even legal. It scares me. I'm telling you, one wrong move and 

))) schwing ((( 

there goes a finger. 

Not shown, one quart (one liter) chicken stock. This uses my own homemade chicken stock Liquid p-Au, where p=poultry.  It could probably use more but I do not have more. I do have commercial stock, and that would work fine, but I decided not to contaminate the magnificence of these ingredients with second-rate ingredients. Maybe I will break down and add some to thin it out, but I do not think that is going to happen. I would rather it be thick. Besides, it still needs its cream. 

Also not shown, 1/2 airline bottle white Zinfandel, about 1/2 cup. 

The soup would be white if this were just cauliflower, or cauliflower and potato, and onion, and such. That is handy to know if for some reason you are in the need for white soup. 

I decided not to add the cream directly to the soup, but rather keep the soup concentrated and add the cream individually as I go. That way it is not sitting around in the soup, and it can be used otherwise.

The dots are garlic chive. The bread is my own, as toast with olive oil. 

This soup is sweet -- the sweetness of carrot and the sweetness of thyme. Thyme is the only herb, and I did use quite a lot, not counting the single garlic chive that is mostly just garnish -- tiny green dots for ART.