Soup's On

Matt will make a Shepherd's Pie for dinner tonight with our leftover lamb from Easter, so I decided to get my Dorie on for lunch. More soup, since I'm still attempting to cook healthy food for a bit (though the bowl of jellybeans I just finished and the impending lamb pie would contradict that claim).

Spiced Squash, Fennel, and Pear Soup (pg 80) is a dish I've been looking forward to cooking since I bought this cookbook. I like squash. I like fennel. I like pears. I couldn't imagine how they'd come together in a soup, though.

This was a very nice recipe, and I would make it again (in the Fall), but it let me down a bit. With such a range of interesting flavors going into the pot--licorice and tangerine and cumin, oh my!--I expected to taste layers and backnotes. Didn't happen. This soup is overwhelmingly, one-notedly gingery. I like ginger, but I expected something more. Next time, I would use fresh ginger instead of ground and see if that animates the other flavors at all. That said, if I ordered this in a restaurant, and it were just called Ginger Butternut Squash Soup, I'd be perfectly happy with it.

More fennel, please!

Remember how I said we're having Shepherd's Pie for dinner? Well I was boiling the lamb bone for stock earlier. Once clean, I tried to break it with the sharp point of a knife to get to the marrow. Fail. Next, I tried bashing it with my heavy rolling pin. As you can see, that didn't work out so well...

A worthy adversary.

How the hell did that happen? Not only did the cutting board split, but the metal plate that says Cuisinart popped right off. My last ditch effort to break into this bone had me wielding branch loppers in the middle of my kitchen. When the blades began to bend and the hinge was visibly strained, I called it a day and named the bone the victor. All hale Woolly's revenge!

Conclusion: Liked. Wish I loved.