liquid gold

I am a bad blogger (p.s. I hate that term). It's been far too long since I last documented my kitchen adventures.
A few Sundays ago, I was a fiercely productive domestic debbie in the kitchen. On the menu that evening was my favorite, butternut squash soup! I've experimented with a lot of recipes, receiving different results each time. Are all butternut squash created equal? Roasting versus being impatient and just cutting up a raw squash until your fingers bleed? Mysteries I have yet to solve. I really wanted to make a butternut squash soup on the sweeter side. I found an Alton Brown  recipe with rave reviews that looked worth a try. Honey, ginger and heavy cream! Can't go wrong!


Is that a squash on your counter,
or are you just happy to see me?




First, I'd like to introduce my giant ass butternut squash. Giant ass squash, meet readers. Readers, meet giant ass squash. Seriously. Look at the size of this thing. Surprisingly, it was the "smallest" to select from at the store. I bought it during a pumpkin picking excursion. The farm has a country market where they sell produce and jams and such. All of their "homegrown" produce was unnaturally huge. I'm talking peppers the size of an infant's head. Typically I use two small butternut squash for a pot of soup. In this case, all that was needed was just one big giant ass squash.







 

1/4 of a roasted giant ass squash




liquid gold. yum.

 


The finished soup was pretty nice. Roasting the squash seemed to bring out more flavor. The soup was a little too sweet for what I was craving, I think the amount of honey I uncontrollably squeezed in might have had something to do with it. Adding some thyme to the top helped mellow the sweetness. Simple, quick and nice!

ravioli and butter: a holy matrimony

Butter tastes great, especially when you are completely unaware of the quantity in which you are consuming. Additional items to add to this equation include; butternut squash, pasta, cheese and of course, more butter. The harvest season means I need only two things, butternut squash and the bible. My true kitchen savior has to be Deborah Madison. The book of hers that I refer to mostly, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, is my go to guide. My ideas about cooking and what to do with mystery vegetables have changed drastically for the better thanks to her. I'll stop here. Deb deserves an entire post praising her genius. 

I'd been interested in making the Deborah Madison recipe for butternut squash ravioli for a while, it just seemed intimidating. I'm too lazy to write out the whole thing, but luckily someone wasn't! Go here for the recipe. Plus, the pictures and the process are outlined more beautifully.

Making ravioli is easier than it looks. My day of ravioli making also inspired a botched old Italian lady accent, think "Mama Lisio will maka you da ravioli". Having a pasta machine, ravioli press and a willing helper makes the process pretty quick. Add in the bad Italian accent and you'll have yourself a great afternoon. While I was cranking out the dough, my kitchen buddy was filling the ravioli press and making all the magic happen.

I took some not-so-pretty photos of a few steps. Excuse the poor unappetizing lighting, please.

 

Brown butter sage and pecan sauce. This is the part where I had to use my body to shield any

onlookers from seeing the insane amount of butter the sage and pecans are now bathing in.

Baby ravioli, all grown up.
  



Tons of butter + ravioli + butternut squash = yes. Yumio! Time-a to eata the ravioli. Mangia mangia.