Yummy Rosted Acorn Squash Soup for the Fall

Ingredients:

3 good sized acorn squash

8 T butter.

2 good sized leeks

4 c. chicken broth

Milk, cream or half and half

2 Baking potatoes

Nutmeg

Rosemary

Sour Cream or Cream fresh

Description:

This is a soup that I came up with out of a desire to have a nice warm comforting fall soup. It certainly has fulfilled that role quite well. It is based off a soup that my boyfriend is quite fond of, and perhaps I'll post about that soup later on.

Anyway this soup is a deliciously golden yellow soup, rich and loquaciously creamy in texture. A mouthful brings you to memories of autumns spent in the pumpkin patch or walking through a colorfully leaf strewn lane. So give it a try.

Procedure:

I started off by splitting and deseeding the squash. Fill the cavity with some butter, about 1T each half and oven roast for a little over an hour or until mostly soft. Mean while cube up the potatoes. You can peal the skin off if you wish, but out of a combination of laziness and like of the rustic flavor and visual aspect, I leave it on. When the squash is done go a head and scoop out the tender golden flesh of the squash into the same bowl as the cubed up potatoes.

Now in your pot, put a few tea spoons of butter and place the chopped up leeks in there to and begin to sauté them. Keep at it until the leeks are nice and soft then add in the chicken broth along with the squash and potatoes. Bring everything to a boil. You want to boil everything until the potatoes are nice and soft. While you're waiting for everything to boil, it is a good time to add the nutmeg and rosemary to your flavor preference.

When everything is done boiling, remove the soup from the heat and pour into the blender. Place the blender on liquify or some similar setting. It may have a bit of trouble mixing since there are a lot of solids in there. This is the point to add the milk. Add as much as it takes to get everything blending smoothly and to your personal preference.

Now just place in a bowl with a dollop of sour cream if you desire or not if you prefer it that way. This soup can be served cold or hot, though I tend to prefer it warm myself.

Camping Fare

We decided to go camping this weekend. It was an awesome time, a huge bon fire beautiful stars in the sky above us and awesome company if somewhat cold, and by cold I mean freezing. When I say freezing I mean literally. Still it was an awesome time and I'm glad that we got to go camping at last. I've been looking forward to it all year and certainly the last couple of months or so.

Of course we brought some food with us to cook for the evening meal and also breakfast the next morning. I'll go ahead an apologize now for being a dummy and forgetting that I had my camera with me as we cooked our dinner, so my descriptive phrase will have to suffice, but I did finally remember it as we were cooking breakfast.

So to start we just made some simple chicken fajitas. Once we got a fire going good and hot, which was something of a challenge due to the fire wood being wet after all the rain here, we got the skillet on there and warming. I chopped up some nice red bell peppers and cut some boneless chicken breast into thinnish strips and did a split right down the middle half the skillet devoted to chicken and the other half devoted to the peppers. We kept everything "au natural" where the spices were concerned, after all this is camping food and not five star fare, right? :-)

It took a fair amount of time for everything to get cooked, especially the peppers, and the fire did eat one slice of chicken due to my unsteady hand. When all was said and done though we took some tortillas piled on some chicken then some peppers and some shredded cheese, sour cream and salsa all to taste before chowing down. I know what you're thinking, salsa and other condiments? Well I know this is camping fare and supposed to be simple, but we're not in the dark ages either you know. It was yummy since we were both hungry and basically had not eaten all day. Such days seem to make food taste even better.

So the next morning we had to get the fire starting again. We had sausage and eggs. There was some brief debate about sunny side up eggs which we both love or scrambled eggs. In the end we decided to go with scrabbled, which if you ever go camping I'd highly recommend since after this experience sunny side up would have never worked. Anyway it was the same basic setup only we cooked the eggs in a cast iron skillet instead of on the cast iron griddle. You can see our setup in the first picture.



Again it took everything a while to finish cooking, but the eggs were nice and moist still and with the addition of some melted cheese on top were great especially on such a cold morning. The sausage too was nice and crispy and delicious. Both meals had that indescribable yummy flavor of smoke from the camp fire and were thoroughly enjoyed. The second pic is our plate loaded up with plenty of cheesy eggs and crispy sausage. A simple but tasty meal. So next time you find yourself going camping, don't forget to bring along the food and someone special to enjoy it with.

a meal making matt

Hello everyone. I'm Matt of a meal making matt. Here you will find blogs about the meals that I make with the included recipes and photos of the final product. Some of the meals are those that I've just cooked for years and others will be creations out of my own mind. Generally between work during the week and a social life on the weekends I tend to cook one or two large meals per week so that I can have left overs for lunch at work. So you can expect to have updates from me about once a week or so.

I'm also thinking that if i happen to get some food from somewhere when I'm feeling kinda lazy and get some good take out or something of the sort I'll post about it here for you to read an salivate about in much the same way I did when I got it.

Anyway I just wanted to get a first post out there in the world for people to read and such. Check back soon for my first real foodie post. :-)