Dinner tonight:
Roasted Butternut Squash Soup and
Joy the Baker's Goat Cheese Biscuits
Soup Ingredients:
1 Organic Butternut Squash
1 Organic Apple
16oz of Organic Vegetable Broth
1 Shallot
Pepper, Nutmeg, and Sriracha.
Butternut squash is seriously delicious, it is orange, savory, and sweet. It reminds me of fall. Fall reminds me of butternut squash. They are probably best friends. Apples could be the third wheel because they are bright, crisp, and red like fall.
Steps:
Cut your squash in half and scoop out the messy part in the middle. Put a little olive oil on the cut edges. Bake in the oven on a cookie sheet at 425 degrees for an hour.
When you have about 10 minutes left throw your sliced apple on the sheet.
Pull out of the oven and let cool.
Rough chop your apple and shallot.
Put in a soup pot with some stock (maybe half). Let simmer.
Rough chop the squash and add it too. Let simmer some more.
Using an immersion blender blend the soup until silky, add stock as needed.
Add some black pepper, nutmeg and Sriracha. If you don't have Sriracha, first you should get some, but second you could use red pepper flakes.
Taste and season until you like it. I don't recommend using salt because your stock is already salted, even if it says "Low Sodium" and you really don't want to overdo it.
Ladle the soup into bowls. You can garnish with the little more sriracha because the color is pretty, or no garnish at all.
Biscuit Ingredients:
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter cut into squares
1 tablespoon unsalted butter for the pan
2 tablespoons melted unsalted butter, to top the biscuits
4 tablespoons (2 oz) goat cheese
1 cup buttermilk (I made mine: 1 tablespoon white vinegar and the rest whole organic milk)
Chris loves biscuits. I love goat cheese. This recipe seemed to fit us. I've been eating mostly vegan these days so all this butter was a little scary but say a prayer for your heart health and go for it because it turned out SO worth it. I don't even bake well and mine turned out.
Steps:
While my squash was roasting I put my cast iron skillet in the oven to pre-heat
My oven was still 425 degrees
If you're making your own buttermilk it needs to sit for about 5 minutes after mixing the vinegar and milk, so do that first.
Then you combine flour, baking powder and salt.
Using your fingers massage the cold butter and goat cheese into the flour mixture. Massage until the mixture looks pebbly and holds shape when you squeeze it.
Make a well in the center of the flour bowl and add the buttermilk.
Using a fork mix the flour into the milk until the dough has no dry flour in it anymore.
Pull out your cast iron and put 1 tbsp butter in it to grease the bottom and sides, swish it around. Melt your 2 tbsp butter in the microwave.
Spoon 1/4 cup amounts of dough into the pan, I got 9 biscuits.
Spread the melted butter on top of the dough.
Bake until the tops looks browned ( I didn't time mine, and I have no idea how long they were in there but...) Joy said hers took 14-16 minutes. I'd keep checking, the color is the thing to look it to know they are done. Let sit for 3-5 minutes and serve warm.
Happy (vegetarian) Eating!
