December 2 – December 9, 2024

Monday:                   Tuna, Egg and Chicken Salads on Arugula

Tuesday:                   Pasta con Pallottine

Wednesday:            Curried Butternut Squash Soup with Crostini

Friday:                       Creamy Polenta with Shrimp and Zucchini

Saturday:                  Margherita Pizza

Sunday:                     Ragù Cilentano with Cavatelli and Tim and Ann

Currying Favor

[Note:  The dinner with Tim and Ann was the highlight of the week, but we’ve already given you that recipe.  The shrimp and zucchini was top-notch and maybe we’ll share that in the future.]

Our neighborhood has been enjoying a wonderful Curried Butternut Squash Soup at Local Provisions, a lively bistro/market.  Beez and I are fans.  We have enjoyed this soup in the restaurant and brought containers of it home to share with the boys when they visit.  For Beez, I’m pretty sure this experience has been entirely positive, but for me, there is a downside:  I don’t like some other cook stealing my thunder.  If there is a curried butternut squash soup that people rave about, I want it to be the one I cook.  And so, I set about trying to outdo the most popular soup in the neighborhood.

My journey began and pretty much ended in confusion.  It turns out that curries – by which is meant a sort of stew with a spicy, gravy-like sauce – do not derive their name from the curry leaf (often dried and ground and used in the group of spices that go into curries), nor from any Indian language, except by way of Portugese traders who used a Tamil word ‘kari’ (meaning spice) to describe the stews they liked to cook, using Indian spices.  Indians themselves call the various dishes we classify as curries by different and specific names. 

As an aside, you may or may not remember that the Portugese were a major colonial power, vying with the Spanish, the English, the Dutch and the French (who were entrenching themselves in parts of India and China, but mostly in Indochina [Vietnam], which did not go so well for them.   In India, the British won out, which makes for much better film and television, since Sir Ben Kingsley and the like get to play Gandhi, with their resonant voices, instead of Jean-Paul Belmondo who mumbles and who is, let’s admit it, a little too worldly and fleshy to play the famously ascetic Mahatma.

Which brings us, by a sort of great-circle route, back to curries which are all the rage in English restaurants and pretty big in England’s most successful colony, the U.S.   And thus, we come to the marvelous curried butternut squash soup that is kind of a thing in our neighborhood.

To re-create this phenomenon, I began to surf the net looking for curries involving butternut squash.  There are many of these and not a few of them involve soup.  The more authentic ones involve a little too much of the heavy, oily coconut milk that requires you, once you have removed the lid from the can, to break through a sort of cuticle of fat in order to release the liquid.  I find this annoying as well as artery clogging, so I chose to use the ’lite’ coconut milk which is free of that gunk. 

You might well ask, in what sense is this soup a curry.  Well, it’s not – it is not a dish cooked in a spicy gravy.  But then again, it has what the Portugese liked most about those kinds of dishes – Indian spices which are, confusingly, also called “curry,” and while this soup might not go down well in London at Nigel’s House of Curry, it goes down well in our neighborhood and, indeed, in our house.  Beez is not convinced that I have bested Local Provisions, but she thinks I’ve tied them in the local curried butternut squash competition.  [Please don’t tell them about the competition – they might step up their game.]

Curried Butternut Squash Soup

(adapted from Minimalist Baker)

Timing:                                           30-45 minutes

Ingredients:

6 cups peeled and chopped butternut squash (1 butternut squash, medium size)

2 cups vegetable broth (we used chicken stock – I have yet to find a vegetable broth that adds much more than water to a soup – oh, you can use water, if you like.

1 can light coconut milk (14 oz.)

1-2 teaspoons chili garlic past (optional) – I strongly recommend – we used 2 teaspoons of sambal olek (a Thais chili paste)

1 ½ tablespoons of curry powder (err on the generous side here, unless you have a very hot curry powder, in which case, back off on the chili paste)

¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 medium shallots sliced thin

2 cloves garlic, minced – we used 1 small clove

1-3 tablespoons maple syrup (1 is plenty)

1 tablespoon coconut or avocado oil (we used grapeseed oil)*

1 pinch sea salt and black pepper (add more to taste – you will want more, trust me – once soup is cooked)

Garnishes:    Toasted pumpkin seeds, Chili garlic paste, Full-fat coconut milk, Créme fraîche

*If you are a follower of RFK, Jr. and the anti-seed oil fringe, go nuts (heck – you’re half-way there already) with whatever oil you like.  The key here is to use a neutral tasting oil to let the curry and squash shine through.

Prep:

Peel butternut squash, halve, scrape out seeds and pulp and chop into 1” or smaller pieces.

Measure out other ingredients

Cook:

Heat a Dutch oven over medium and, when its hot, add the oil the shallots and, a bit later the garlic.  Sauté the shallots for 1 minute and the garlic for the last ½ minute of that, stirring, and then add the squash and stir to coat. 

Add the salt, pepper, curry powder and ground cinnamon and stir again. 

Cover and cook for 4 minutes, stirring every minute or so.

Now add the coconut milk, the broth or stock, the maple syrup and the chili galic paste.

Bring to a low boil over medium (don’t turn up the heat beyond medium – this will take a while, but it allows the squash to cook without caramelizing), reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes – until the squash is fork tender.

Transfer soup to a blender and purée on high until smooth.  Return soup to the pot.

Taste and adjust seasonings, adding more curry powder, or salt or pepper as needed.

Serve with garnishes of choice.  We used pumpkin seeds – you need this for some texture – and créme fraiche, Billy and I add generous dollops of garlic chili paste.