Curried Squash Tomato Bisque

It's that time of year when my dad realizes that he planted waaaaay too much squash, and so he pawns it off on his more-than-willing children. Or maybe that's why he plants so much. Either way, I always get a ton of squash from my dad's garden around this time of year and I've found the perfect recipe for using a bunch of it. 

My mom made a vegan tomato squash soup a few years back for Christmas and it was delicious (yeah, my mom rocks). If I remember correctly, it was tomatoes and squash pureed together with some vegetable broth and then sauteed onions were added to it (or maybe the onions were blended in, I can't remember). She gave me the recipe and the first time I made it I taste-tested it and it wasn't as good as my mom's. Not a big surprise there. I let it sit for a while there on my stove and pondered my inadequacy. 

But instead of coming to terms with my failure in the kitchen, I decided to make the soup my own. I added a can of coconut milk to it and some curry powder, garam masala and cumin and BAM! It became something very different and very delicious. The recipe has been tweaked since then, of course. I took garam masala out of it because I ran out and didn't feel like buying more. I'm sure you could put a little in and it wouldn't hurt. And I found that it doesn't need veggie broth, though I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to have some in there if you wanted more leftovers. 

It eats like a meal. And it goes great with saltines or some good crusty bread. 

It's not every year I post an original recipe on this blog. So enjoy, dear readers:

Curried Squash Tomato Bisque

4 cups of butternut squash pulp (other kinds of squash work, too, but probably not every kind)
2 tbsp. olive oil
1 large onion chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds (or 1/2 tsp ground cumin)
28 oz can whole tomatoes with juice
15 oz can of of coconut milk
1 tsp. curry powder (start with 1, add more to taste)
1 tsp. salt
¼ tsp fresh ground pepper
1/8 tsp garlic powder
2 bay leaves

Bake squash (cut in half the long way, place in 1/4 inch of water in a casserole dish, bake at 375 until easily pierced with fork) until tender. Scrape it all out.

Heat oil on med/high heat, add cumin seeds and let them sizzle and/or pop for 30 seconds or so. Add onion and sauté until browned.

Put Tomatoes (with juice) in processor. Blend.

Add squash and onions, process until smooth (the cumin seeds won't blend up and that's fine). If you have an immersion blender, you can blend everything in the pot, but I like to used a food processor and then an immersion blender later if needed. I think it's easier to get a smoother texture that way.

Put that all in a pot, add the coconut milk and heat it up. Add curry powder, salt, pepper and garlic powder (and ground cumin if you didn't use cumin seeds back when you fried the onions). Taste and add more of any of these spices as needed. Add bay leaves and simmer for as long as you want, stirring occasionally.

I'd post a photo, but it's just orange. Close your eyes and imagine the color orange. There you go. That's what the soup looks like. 

OK fine, I'll take a quick photo with my webcam. 

See. Orange. And now you know I have a Maytag stove. 

Reheats wonderfully. Enjoy!

What the Hell Do I Do With... Turnips? (And a lot of things to do with Radishes.)

So, Turnips...


Actually, first of all, I'm going to post everyone's ideas on what to do with Radishes from last week. Unfortunately, I ended up eating all of ours raw before getting the chance to try any of these out, and then we didn't get any in our most recent box. Hopefully we'll get some this week (if you were to tell myself 10 years ago that ten years in the future I would want to eat radishes, I would have called you a crazy liar).


Jacqueline did this: "Just very thinly slice them up, toss with a tad of olive oil, lay out a single layer on a baking sheet and bake them at 400 degrees for about 10-15 minutes, watching that they don't burn." I think this is the one I'm going to try first if we get more this week. I love chips of any sort and these sound really good. I'll probably end up adding a bit of salt. 


Achim had this recipe for radish soup: "Mainly the green leaves are used. Peel and dice 2 potatoes and 1/2 onion. Cook for some 20 min in 2 c vegetable broth. Chop radish greens, add it to the soup, blend it in a food processor or something, add 1/2 c soy milk and some salt (if necessary). Let some thin radish slices hover on the soup."


Lisa makes dressing, "with a couple radishes, some, olive oil, agave, garlic, and red pepper flakes whirred up in a blender. Spicy!"


Tara (or Nate?) at Vegan Piggy made a tabbouleh out of The Kind Diet and blogged about it here.


Hase likes them raw.


Mangocheeks (great name, by the way) also enjoys them raw, dipped in salt and chili powder. 


The Voracious Vegan likes them roasted, but also raw and in a salad. I like that idea. Salads don't usually do it for me, so then I have to smother them in dressing in order to get the level of flavor I like. But I could imagine radishes doing that trick, too. 


A couple friends on Facebook also said they love radishes roasted. 


And finally, my friend Heidi on Facebook said to, "Smear them with fresh butter and sprinkle with coarse salt." I'll opt for soy butter, of course, and it sounds delicious. 

Thanks for all the ideas!

And now on to turnips. 

Here's what I did with the turnips we got:

Don't those look delicious? Well, they weren't. They tasted way to turnipy. Yes, turnipy.

I used this recipe online and I don't know, maybe I didn't bake them long enough. They weren't crunchy at all and they didn't taste that great. 

So hit me with it. What the hell do you do with turnips? 

Random Photos

So I have photos. And I want to post them. So here you go.

We made cinnamon buns last weekend. We used this recipe at Vegan Yum Yum. We didn't use a big enough dish and didn't bake them long enough so the inside rolls were kind of gooey and not fully cooked (I think it's mostly because they didn't have enough room to expand, but then agian I'm sort of a bread novice), but the outsides pieces were pretty damn good. Definitely going to try it again with a bigger pan (or 2).

Here they are basking in the yellow glow of our stove light.






Liam's first birthday was in January. At first, we were going to have it at our house, but enough people RSVPd yes that we decided to move the party to a hotel near our house. All we had to do was rent a room for the night and they let us use the pool area the next day. There you go. A cheap pool-party birthday.


Liam wasn't actually too into the cake. He ate some, but like any food, he tired of it after a few bites and wanted something else (this is a blessing in disguise because it means he loves eating new foods).


Sledding in the back yard.


And I made a snow angel.


This was Anna's idea. I thought it looked cool.


She still loves her stuffed friends. George is laying on Rocky (the dog) who is laying on Buddy (the bear).


Anna's frosty window in the morning.




Jen and Liam.








Anna likes to help in the kitchen.


And I suppose the secret is out now. That's right. I'm pregnant.

OK. Not really. Seriously though, my gut is not usually that pronounced. But it is what it is. What can I say? I like food, beer and I don't regularly exercise. Sue me.

Actually, I sort of wear my weight with pride. I haven't lost a single pound since choosing veganism over seven years ago. That's not to say that you can't lose weight by going vegan, but ... well, look at me. I'm not exactly wasting away over here.

I'm still watching Ella on Friday's, much to my kids' delight. Liam has taken quite a shine to her. He even wants to hug her now when she comes over. It's awwwwwdorable.

No Mofo for this Mofo

Ah, VeganMofo, that glorious month where hundreds of bloggers sign up to post something vegan-food-related at least once every weekday during the month of October.

I did it last year. It was fun. I really wanted to do it again this year, but decided I didn't have the time (click here to see my Mofo posts from last year).

So I'm not doing it this year, but it's still on my mind. And to all you VeganMofoers out there, good on ya.

But I feel like joining in a bit on the fun, so here's a photo. Anna made some pickles with her mom and her mom's mom on Saturday.


Be sure to check out all the blogs participating in VeganMofo this year. It's staggering. I love that there is too much veganism out there on the web for one person to ever read in their lifetime. It gives me warm fuzzies inside.

Kids' Day at the CSA

This last Saturday, a bunch of families descended upon a small farm near Osceola, MN to get dirt under their nails, bugs in their hair and food on their plates.

This is the third summer that we've had a share in Foxtail Farms CSA, but it's the first time we made it out there for the kids' day. I guess it took having photos of Anna picking vegetables for me to finally write something substantial about our CSA.

The first thing we saw when we pulled up were goats and kids feeding the goats. Anna said, "Look, they have doggies!" We corrected her before getting out of the car. (City dweller shame is an embarrassing burden to bear.)


Anna watched the kids feed the goats.


We didn't encourage her to feed them, but we also didn't discourage her. She decided on her own to stand back and just watch.

I honestly do not know why there are goats on this farm. For milk? As pets? There were also chickens, some cows and a bull. They all looked healthy and in good spirits. I decided to ignore the fact of their property status and that they might be used for food. Because it was kids day, and this farm is awesome and we were there to have fun, dammit.


For those of you unaware of the CSA movement, here's a blurb from the Foxtail website:

"CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Each spring, CSA members purchase a "share" of the farm's produce. Fresh vegetables are delivered weekly throughout the growing season, usually from mid-June through October. The farmer benefits by having an established market, while the members enjoy a wide variety of the freshest produce available all summer. In addition, by joining a CSA, members are supporting small scale, local, sustainable farming."

And we get wagon rides!




Here's Jen and Anna on the wagon. Where was Liam, you ask? I was wearing him. It made taking photos especially difficult, given his affinity for chewing on straps of any sort. Hell, for chewing on anything. He probably would have chowed down on the lens had I given him the chance.


Farmer Paul (if I remember correctly) drove us out to the fields. First stop: Potato Town.

The farmer stomped a pitch fork into the hard soil and loosened a clump of potatoes just enough for the kids to pull it out the rest of the way. Anna just sort of stood there and watched the older kids. It looked dirty to her. She's not a total clean freak, but she likes to be generally dirt-free. I instantly knew what was running through her head (because it was running through mine as well ... like father, like daughter, right?) so I told her to just dig right in. "It's OK," I said, "You'll get dirty. You're supposed to get dirty. The dirtier the better."


So she got dirty and picked a bunch of potatoes. It was work. She had to look under things and bend over and pull hard.

Next stop: Carrot Town. There was no hesitation this time. Anna dug right in. A lot of tops of carrots were snapped off, since the pitch fork couldn't be in all places at once. I wonder if we'll get the bottom halves in a future delivery...


Next stop: Bean Town.

On the way to Bean Town, I heard a couple tweens wondering what beans grew on. A bush? A tree? Yes, they eventually decided, beans grow on a tree. And this is what was great about the day. Kids learning where their food comes from. What it looks like before it's on their plate.

I almost cried while watching Anna's hands move through the beans. I saw grace and a fluidity of movement, I saw determination and a keen eye. I saw my daughter pick those beans with her own two hands.


I saw her face beam with well-deserved pride.


In the most recent newsletter that comes with the CSA box we get each Thursday, the writer (who is, I believe, one of the two owners of the farm) said, "...it is only through intense interactions with the physical world that food is generated for people to eat."

I wouldn't call what we did intense. It was an infinitesimal percentage of the work that goes on every day at that farm. But I could tell that Anna took pride in it and she considered it to be a certain level of work.

Later that day when I started to prepare supper, Anna was in the kitchen asking to help. That happens rarely, if ever. But here she was, asking to skin the potatoes; to cut the potaotes. And I let her. With my really sharp knife. How could I say no? She picked these potatoes. It only seemed natural that she wanted to also prepare them. (Note: I held the knife with her and was as safe as possible. Well, I let her try it on her own for one of the smaller potatoes.)

And then she ate the potatoes. And she ate the carrots raw. And she ate raw green beans, too.

[Side note: When we were in North Dakota a couple weeks ago we got to eat my mom's pickles. We came back to Saint Paul and I picked up some pickles at the store. I put a couple on Anna's plate and she looked at them and asked in a dissapointed tone, "are these from the store?"]

Foxtail has interns. They live at the farm and work for room and board. This guy is one of them, I'm pretty sure. He walked alongside the wagon, making sure kids weren't getting run over and whatnot. In the background is where our basil and cucumbers (among other things) grow. I kept referring to it as a grow house, which tells you that I've spent more time in my life watching "Weeds" than I have picking weeds.


On the wagon ride, a kid commented to her parents that the green houses reminded her of something out of a Mario game. I jokingly shushed her and the parents and I shared a knowing glance. Like I said ... shame of the City Dwellers.

After the wagon ride, we sat on the big lawn and ate potluck food, most of which was made from the veggies share-holders got from the very farm they were touring. Fresh food and smiles abounded.

Then I fell in love with a big old barn. Here are my adoring photos of it.






And to top it all off, Anna got to swing on the largest and highest swing she will probably ever swing on. She's still a little leery of "big kid" swings, so she didn't want to go super high. Next year...


And finally, our booty for the day. This is the kind of stuff we're going to get every week for the next month or so, but these tasted better. The vegetables of our labor.


This is "morganically grown" produce here. From the Foxtail website:

"'Certified Organic' is a useful term for food grown by farms thousands of miles away, but we are developing a relationship where the farmer and consumer know and depend on each other. Morganic is local, grown to organic standards, hours old fresh, and sold directly to the consumer. You can talk to the farmer and tour the farm. That is the only way to be sure of your food."

To find a CSA in your area, go here. I strongly suggest it. It's a hunk of money up front, but it pays off. You'll eat fresher, healthier and localer. Yep. Localer.

Anna's 3rd Birthday Party

Anna turns 3 in a few days so we celebrated her birthday on the 4th.

We had it at a park with a zero depth entry wading pool.


It's a wading pool, but Anna still wanted to use her floaty ring.


Our friend Erin made the cupcakes. Cookies and cream. Yum.




Here's a shirtless Liam with his aunt Anne (my sister) and cousin Zach. We intended for this to be the first time taking him in the water, but it never quite happened. Probably a good thing, since the water was reeeeeally cold.


That night we lit off a few fireworks.


Anna went to bed shortly after this photo was taken, only to wake up (or she never went to sleep) about an hour later. We were all still hanging out in the back yard, watching the big fireworks being set off from somewhere not too far away. Mrs. Piggy brought Anna into the back yard to watch. She saw one big explosion and said she wanted to go back inside.

Once she fell asleep Jen (Mrs. Piggy), Jessica (her sister) and I played around with sparklers, spelling names with a ten second exposure.








Anna's favorite birthday present so far (and she's only really explored about 20 percent of her presents) is the swing that we gave her. Yes, we hung it from the tree in our back yard. Also, I tested it with a 50 lb. bag of sand (which I bought to fill up the sand box/water activity table her grandpa gave her) with five continuous minutes of swinging before Anna ever got in it. So it's safe. Unless she suddenly gains a ton of weight ... or the branch starts to die. Then I'll have to reassess the situation.




I suggested to Anna that we name the tree the Giving Tree. No, she said, let's just call it tree.