Soup Season: Butternut Squash Soup

It’s finally soup weather here in sunny Northeastern Ohio, and my goal this winter is to eat as little storebought soup as possible, since it’s generally either full of sodium and or other badness, or tastes approximately like dishwater.  So far this soup season, I’ve eaten my way through two batches of roasted butternut squash soup.  My recipe is a variation on this one at the Food Network.  It’s quick, easy, delicious and freezes and reheats well.

It occurred to me that half gallon canning jars are PERFECT for soup storage.

Butternut Squash Soup

• 5-6 lbs. butternut squash (two)
• 2-3 T olive oil
• garlic salt
• ground pepper
• 3 medium onions, diced
• 2 T spicy curry powder
• 8 c chicken or veggie stock

Preheat oven to 375°.  Halve squash lengthwise and drizzle with oil.  Rub oil evenly over squash surface.  Season liberally with garlic salt and  pepper.  Pop in the oven for an hour or so, until soft and easily scooped from skin.

When I say "liberally," I'm not kidding around.

Remove squash from the oven and allow to cool, so as not to burn your hands.

Meanwhile, dice your onions and toss them in a large pot.  Drizzle with remaining olive oil then saute over medium high heat until translucent.  Add curry powder, mix in, and heat for a minute or two.  Add 4 c stock and mix.  Scoop flesh from your cooled squash into the pot and mix.  Add remaining stock and mix.  Increase heat to high and bring to a boil, then reduce to medium high and cook for 15 minutes.

Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Turn off the heat.  Using an immersion blender, puree the soup until it’s nice and smooth.  In theory, you could transfer in batches to a blender, but it’s much easier (and requires less clean up) this way.

Enjoy!  Alternately, toss it in the fridge or freezer for this week’s lunches, then eat in front of your envious co-workers.

Canning Sauerkraut

No, the greenish fellow in the center is not a mutant -- just poor aesthetic choice of use for a blue jar.

We made kraut this year with the fellow’s family, and yesterday his mother brought over our four gallon crock.  Apparently, most of the brine had either evaporated, wicked out, or leaked, which as you probably know means it was susceptible to growing things if we didn’t get it frozen, canned, or covered in more brine.  Since it was already “done” (i.e. tangy and delicious) and we’re running low on freezer space (due to 1/12 of a cow and expectation of a bunch of ground beef and perhaps some venison to come), I opted for canning.

We lost some kraut due to skimming off the nasty during fermentation, my general inability to can anything without making a mess of it, and the shattering of one jar in the canner, but came out with essentially 10 1/2 quarts of kraut canned from a mostly full 4 gallon crock at the onset of the fermenting process.  After gifting a few quarts, we’ll still be in good kraut shape for a while.

At some point, I’ll post an ode to sauerkraut and all its many virtues, but for now, here’s the basic process for canning, roughly paraphrased from my favorite canning tome (Ball).

Canned Sauerkraut

• Sauerkraut

Set water bath canner to heating.  Prepare canning jars (roughly 3 jars per gallon crock size to be safe — i.e. a 2 gallon crock ought to net you somewhere around 5-6 quarts of kraut) and lids.

Fill jars with kraut, packing relatively tightly.  To do this, you can use the spoon part of a large spoon for scooping and the handle for packing.  Leave app. 1/2 inch headspace.  Put lids on jars.

Process in a boiling water bath canner for 25 minutes (quarts) or 20 minutes (pints).  Enjoy a few months later on reubens, with apples and sausage, in choucroute garnie, or just all by its lonesome.  Alternately, give as gifts to friends, along with jars of some kind of spicy mustard, prepared horseradish, and hot dog or sausage of choice.