Improv recipe: Roasted Curried Sweet Vegetables

This is not the healthiest dish out there, but it sure is tasty. You could probably tone down the amount of oil used, and omit the butter entirely, if you are trying to be a bit healthy. You can, of course, make things less spicy if you don't do well with heat. Make sure to taste the mixture to see if it's to your liking before you slather it on your veggies.

One last note: Unless you are an expert with a knife, do not attempt this recipe without a sharp vegetable peeler. Acorn squash are kind of a pain to peel. You can substitute a small butternut squash, which is a little bit easier to peel.

Roasted curried sweet vegetables
Serves 4 as a side dish

2 sweet potatoes
1 medium acorn squash

¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup brown sugar
1 clove garlic, crushed
1-2 Tablespoons curry powder
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 cloves
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons butter

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Peel vegetables, cut into 1 inch cubes. Combine the rest of the ingredients except for the butter. Taste mixture and adjust seasoning as necessary. Coat vegetables with mixture.

Put vegetables in large oven-safe dish or wide-lipped baking sheet. Dot with butter.

Cook for 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes, or until veggies are tender.

Forget Chicken Soup for the Soul. I need chicken soup for me!

I've been down for nearly a week with the flu. Remember: the flu shot is your friend. If I hadn't gotten one, I'd still be very, very, sick.

I'm finally back up, and back to blogging. Now that I'm back, I wanted to highlight some good chicken soup recipes.

Ma Cobb's Chicken Soup-Featured in Big Damn Chefs and on The Signal Podcast, this great chicken soup recipe has lots of curry, cayenne, and garlic.

The Barefoot Contessa has a great chicken stock recipe. I like this one because it tells you how much salt to put in the stock. Most recipes don't. For a novice cook, the hardest thing about making stock, is making sure it's got enough salt in it. But, don't discard the chicken like it says to. Pick the chicken out, dice up some carrots and celery, and use it for the soup.

Katie's lazy chicken soup-This recipe was invented by my younger sister. Still twice as good as what you'd get in a can, but so easy you can whip it together in a half hour, with very little chopping, even if you have the flu. Serves 2

1 carton chicken stock
1 small bag baby carrots
celery, roughly chopped (optional)
Box of seasoned pre-cooked chicken breast strips, Italian or Southwest seasoning.
1-2 cups egg noodles
1 Tablespoon Italian Seasoning or Poultry Seasoning (optional)
2 cloves crushed garlic (optional)

Heat up chicken broth. Add carrots, garlic, and other vegetables if using. Simmer 10 minutes. Add egg noodles and chicken strips, and simmer another 10-15 minutes until veggies get as tender as you want them and chicken strips are heated through. Taste soup and add extra seasoning if needed, but the seasoning on the strips should be enough.

Whose recipe is it anyway: squash soup

Much like Whose Line is it Anyway is/was a show based on Improvisation, my "Whose recipe is it anyway" will be a repository of improvised recipes.

Yesterday, I made a very nice free-form squash soup for lunch. I used up a bunch of leftovers-- squash, roasted peppers, and a half a carton of heavy cream I had in the fridge.

Hardware
Small saucepan
stick blender or regular old blender

Software
1 roasted squash, cubed (this was something I picked up from the farmer's market. I can't tell you what variety it was)
2 roasted bell peppers, cut into strips
1-2 cups of chicken broth
1/2 cup of heavy cream
1-2 Tablespoons of curry powder (more or less to suit your tastes)
salt and pepper to taste.

Simmer squash, peppers, and chicken broth until heated through. Add heavy cream. Turn off heat, add curry powder, salt and pepper to taste.
Puree mixture in the blender, or use a stick blender. Puree less if you want it chunky, more if you want it smooth.

This was pretty tasty. I should have pureed it smoother, because the squash chunks were a tad stringy. The curry powder I used was very mild. Idea was based on something from Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa show on Food Network. Adding the curry powder I got from a different squash soup recipe in a newsletter.