Monday, November 01, 2010

Fall Cooking

This weekend I tried a new recipe for butternut squash soup. We love this kind of soup in the fall especially, just so perfect in flavor and color. This time I used Smitten Kitchen's Fall Squash Soup recipe.
The results were mixed. It used similar flavors to what I have done before (ginger, thyme, cream), but added cumin which I hadn't tried. It called for 1 1/2 teaspoons of ground cumin which we found to be a bit overpowering at first. But we had the soup again for dinner tonight (this recipe makes a ton o' soup) and it tasted really nice. So either halve the amount of cumin or make it ahead of time and then let it sit in the fridge overnight to mellow out the cumin taste. Or if you're just a crazy cumin fan, then go for it and enjoy your cumin squash soup.

And since I recently tried out a curried carrot soup which was beyond yummy (especially with yogurt dolloped on top), this soup didn't seem quite as good. I might add some carrots and curry to the remaining soup when I take it out of the freezer to see how it turns out.

Sunday was kind of a Smitten Kitchen day since I also used her recipes to make a Wild Mushroom and Stilton Galette and Spiced Applesauce Cake.

The galette was delicious. I accidentally wasn't paying attention at the supermarket and didn't buy quite enough mushrooms, but it was still yummy. Definitely a BOLD taste, but Jason enjoyed it and Hazel even ate most of her piece. And I didn't actually use the dried wild mushrooms she asks for, but I bet that they would make the tart even more delish.

The spiced applesauce cake was yum. Pure and simple. I added a little more cinnamon to the frosting than was called for, but it was still just delicious. How can you go wrong with applesauce cake made with homemade applesauce and cream cheese frosting? You can't.

So those are my recent adventures in cooking. I'm trying more and more to use Sundays as the special day of the week to try out new recipes and try out some special foods to make the day more fun and unique. Jason thinks it's fun. Hazel does to, but I think she likes having extra time with Daddy and doing a craft with us more than she's impressed with a new recipe.

Have you tried any new recipes lately?

3 comments:

Jill said...

Liz, that curried carrot soup sounds delicious. I have a lonely bag of carrots in my fridge that are making me feel guilty every time I look at them...now I have a plan for them. Thanks!

Ri said...

Oh, I saw these on Smitten Kitchen too! So glad you tried them and reported back. The curried carrot soup sounds really good... I'll be trying that one soon.

Mary and Jim said...

Do you have your grandmother's recipe for applesauce cake? The one I always made. Best ever.