Butternut Squash and Apple Bisque from Food Truck Road Trip

The weather is decidedly soupy here - I'm not making much ice cream, but I am baking cookies and cooking soups and stews. So when I saw that there was a soup recipe available for blog publication from the cookbook Food Truck Road Trip, I decided that was what I wanted to make.

I've made plenty of butternut squash soups before, and they're all a little bit different. This one includes apple butter and citrus juice and zest along with the more typical ingredients.

Oh! And there's brown sugar, too, which was a bit of a surprise to me. I can't say that I've made a whole lot of soups that included sugar of any kind.

But - this isn't a sweet soup. Not a dessert soup. The brown sugar adds that hint of molasses and a tiny bit of sweetness, but that's offset by the added brightness from the citrus. It's really well balanced.

I thought the soup's presentation in the book was interesting - served in a jar - but in the end I preferred eating it out of a bowl, although a mug would have been just as nice.

This recipe calls for blending the soup in a standard blender, but I used a stick blender instead. It does the job well, and there's no need for transferring batches of hot soup in and out of a blender.

Butternut Squash and Apple Bisque
SAVOR SOUP HOUSE—ADAM DUNN AND COLLEEN SCHROHT—PORTLAND, OR
From Food Truck Road Trip by Kim Pham, Philip Shen, Terri Phillips
Printed with permission of Page St. Publishing

On a cold winter day, nothing can spread that warm glow like a good bowl of soup. “This is a super simple comfort food that’s nice to come home to,” says Adam Dunn. “It can be made relatively quickly, and it’s a great way to relax and warm up.” Rich, creamy butternut squash is brightened up by sweet apple butter and citrus zest.

Serves 5

1 large butternut squash
Olive oil, for coating
Water
1 large yellow onion, diced
4 tbsp (56g) butter
1 1/2 qt (1420ml) vegetable stock
8 oz (227g) apple butter
1/4 cup (61g) cream
2 tbsp (25g) packed brown sugar
Zest and juice of 1 lemon, or to taste
Zest and juice of 1 orange, or to taste
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C, or gas mark 5). Halve and seed the butternut squash and place skin-side up on a baking pan. Coat the squash lightly with olive oil, add a dash of water to the pan and bake for 45 minutes; this helps separate the skin of the squash for easy peeling.

Sauté the diced onion in the butter in a medium pot over medium heat. Add the vegetable stock and apple butter and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.

Once the squash is done, scoop out the flesh and add it to a blender along with the onion mixture, cream, sugar, lemon and orange zests, salt and pepper. Add the lemon and orange juices to taste. Blend until all the ingredients are thoroughly smooth.

Giveaway is OVER.

Cooking for Hobbits: Wine-Braised Oxtails

Wine-braised oxtails with a potato-squash mash.

I know that a lot of people think that oxtails are a little weird. I mean, they're beef, but they sure don't look like a steak or a roast.

On the other hand, I've been eating them since I was a kid, so they seem perfectly normal to me.

The funny thing is that now that nose-to-tail cooking is becoming such a trend, a lot of the odd meat items are now selling for premium prices.

Oxtails and short ribs are no longer cheap eats, but at least they're not yet fetching prime prices.

Mom's oxtails always were made with a tomato sauce that verged on being a barbecue sauce, so this was a pretty big departure from what I normally make - there are no tomatoes at all, and a lot more garlic.

The recipe is from The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery by Chris-Rachael Oseland who blogs at Kitchen Overlord. I received a PDF of the book to work from, but there's also a hardcover version.

The only problem I had with this recipe is that Hobbitses who live in the Shire are doing all of their cooking at sea level. Maybe a little lower than sea level.

I mean, they're kinda short, right?

Up here in the Misty Mountains, braised foods take longer to cook, and when we're talking about a tough cut of meat, they can take a LOT longer. I cooked these an additional 2 hours to get them tender. The larger ones could possibly have cooked an hour beyond that to make them super-tender.

If you have a choice, it's great if you can get oxtails all of a similar size for even cooking. They range from pretty small to pretty big. The packages I got were pre-packed and vacuum sealed, so I didn't have much choice in the matter. Of course, you can fish out the smaller ones sooner while you let the larger pieces braise longer. Or separate them into batches for different uses. Oxtail soup with barley is one of my favorites.

Mom always served her oxtails with wide egg noodles or boiled potatoes, but I decided to serve mine with a potato-squash mash. No recipe, just roughly half of each with butter, milk, salt, and pepper. Not fancy, but really, really good.

Wine Braised Oxtails
Recipe from The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery by Chris-Rachael Oseland
Used with permission. All rights reserved.

A lot of people shy away from cuts of meat full of bone and fat. It’s a shame, because that’s where the best flavor hides. In Tolkien’s day, nose to tail eating was the norm. A nice segmented oxtail was a great way to get a few bites of rich meat for the whole family with the added bonus of creating a pot of incredibly flavorful broth that would last the week.

3 lbs / 1.3 kg oxtails
1 tbsp butter
2 c / 475 ml red wine
2 c / 475 ml beef or vegetable broth (whatever you have)
2 bay leaves
2 sprigs fresh rosemary (about ½ tbsp pulled off the stem)
1 whole onion, peeled
6 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

Melt 1 tbsp butter in a dutch oven or large, sturdy stockpot. Over a medium-high heat, brown the oxtails on all sides. Make sure to brown the fatty side. That adds a lot of flavor.

Once your oxtails are browned up, drown them in red wine and broth. Add the bay leaves, fresh rosemary, crushed garlic cloves, and whole, peeled onion. You can tuck them in a cheesecloth sachet if you’d like to keep things tidy, but it’s not strictly necessary.

When the wine and broth mix comes to a boil, put the lid on your dutch oven. Reduce the heat to low and let it continue simmering for the next 2 hours. Check on the oxtails every half an hour or so to baste them in the cooking liquid.

If you want to make a stew of it, after two hours of cooking, add 3 lbs / 1.3 kg peeled carrots, potatoes, turnips, or the root veggies of your choice. Make sure they’re all cut into equal sized pieces no more than 2 inches / 5 cm. Bring the pot back to a boil, then turn the heat down to low and keep simmering for the next 30-45 minutes, or until the veggies are all soft, but not yet falling apart.

If you don’t want to make a stew of it, just simmer the oxtails for 2 hours and 45 minutes, or until they’re so tender the meat nearly falls off the bone.

Now you have a couple choices. If you’re feeling extra rustic, you can serve the oxtails whole and let people pick at them to find all the good bits. However, if you have guests who are a little squeamish about seeing an actual piece of bone on their plate, go ahead and pull the meat off the bone for them. If you’re making a stew, pile the meat on top of the vegetables right before serving. If you’re just making oxtails, try serving the meat on top of a fresh slice of Boxty. (Which you can find in the Hobbit cookbook.)

Before serving, remove 1 cup of fluid from the pot to use as a sauce. You can make an easy gravy by whisking together 2 tbsp flour with ⅓ c cold water until the mix is free of lumps. (If you’re allergic to gluten, substitute 1 tsp cornstarch.) Mix the cup of reserved juices into the cold flour water, whisking violently to keep it lump-free. Add salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce to spruce it back up.

After dinner (or after picking the bones clean for squeamish guests), return the bones and other leftover bits of the oxtails to the pot. Fill it the rest of the way up with water and bring it back to a boil. You can add a couple carrots and celery sticks for added flavor if you’d like. Let it boil while you entertain your guests at dinner, or for at least 2-3 hours. That gives it time to leach all the last flavor from the bones and marrow. If the night runs late, you can always put everything in a crockpot set to low and forget about it while you go to sleep.

Either way, you now have delicious home made beef broth you can use in anything. Take a sip and you’ll never want to use store bought broth again. Strain out the solids and store it in the fridge for up to a week.

If you’re not in the mood to make broth from the leftovers, at least make sure to strain all the juices out of the pan left after making your gravy. You can make a simple, filling soup of it the next day by adding 1 part water to 1 part juices or just sop it up with stale bread for a truly lazy yet decadent snack.

I received a PDF of the book at no cost to me. I'll probably buy the hardcover version when it's available, because it's really cute and I'm a geek.

Two recipes from Tyler Florence's Real Kitchen: Chilled Asparagus with Citrus Vinaigrette - and - Ricotta Tart with Fresh Tomatoes, Basil, and Black Olives

So, with this Cook My Book group that I belong to, we pass cookbooks around, trying recipes, scribbling in them, and posting results in our Facebook group.

We're not required to cook recipes from any particular book, but it would make no sense to just pass them around and read them. So we all cook stuff.

I try really hard to cook at least two recipes, and I cook more when I have time and when I particularly love the book.

Sometimes I only manage one. Sometimes I cook a lot. Sometimes I only cook one or two, and I copy a bunch of recipes and I cook them after the book has moved on to its next home.

Most of them are good, but let's face it, not every recipe is one that I want to make again. Sometimes a recipe is good, but I already make a recipe that I like. Others, I know I want to make them over and over again. Some recipes are good enough to make again, but I still don't blog about them. I have to like the recipe AND the photos.

When I got my paws on Tyler Florence's Real Kitchen, there were two recipes that I was awfully fond of. The first was chilled asparagus with a citrus vinaigrette. I love cold asparagus, but I usually go with simple squeeze of lemon or drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and a little drizzle of oil.

But when I tried the vinaigrette, I loved it. Not only on the asparagus, but it made a create drizzle on other vegetables and on green salad. The asparagus is basic chilled asparagus. If you've cooked it before, you probably don't need instructions.

But the vinaigrette is really great. Give it a try.

I skipped the mint, because I didn't want to buy it just for a garnish.

Chilled Asparagus with Citrus Vinaigrette
Adapted from Tyler Florence's Real Kitchen by Tyler Florence

2 bunches asparagus, trimmed
Juice and zest of 1 orange
Juice and zest of 1 lime
Juice and zest of I lemon
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
Sea salt and freshly ground black cppr
1/4 cup canola oil
Fresh mint, for garnish

Bring a pot of lightly called water to a boil and till a large bowl with ice water. Trim the woody ends off the asparagus spears. Blanch the asparagus in the boiling water for 3 minutes (or until they're done to your liking). Dump the asparagus into the ice water to stop them from cooking any further. This also keeps the bight green color.

Whiz the citrus juices. zests. mustard, salt, and pepper together in a blender Gradually drizzle in the oil until the vinaigrette thickens,

Drain the asparagus and arrange the spears on a serving platter. Pour on the vinaigrette, garnish with fresh mint, and serve,

One more recipe ...

The second recipe I loved from this book was a ricotta tart. Next time I make this, I think I'll cut back on the garlic, or possibly eliminate it and add some herbs instead. Or perhaps a layer of caramelized onion.

For the tomato salad, I used the same ingredients, but cut the tomatoes into slightly larger wedges.

Instead of putting the tart on top of the tomatoes, which would have been wobbly and probably would have made it harder to eat, I served the tomatoes on the side.

If you're not in the mood for making a ricotta tart, the tomato salad is great on its own.

Ricotta Tart with Fresh Tomatoes, Basil, and Black Olives
Adapted from Tyler Florence's Real Kitchen by Tyler Florence

For the pastry:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted buttet, cold, cut in chunks
1 egg, separated
3 tablespoons ice water, plus more, if needed

For the ricotta filling:
I head roasted garlic
4 eggs
1 (15-ounce) container ricotta cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1 teaspoon sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

For the fresh tomato salad:
4 ripe tomatoes. cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices
1/2 cup pitted and sliced kalamata olives
5 fresh basil leaves. hand-torn
Zest of 1 orange. finely grated
Extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

To roast the garlic:
Bang the garlic head on the counter to loosen the cloves. Put the separated
cloves in a piece of aluminum foil, drizzle with olive oil, and close up the pouch. Bake for 30 minutes
(you can bake them with the tart shell). The garlic should be soft.

To make the crust:
Pulse the flour. salt, and sugar together in a food processor fitted with the metal blade. Add the butter and pulse until the dough resembles cornmeal. Add the egg yolk and the ice water: pulse again to pull the dough together.

Flour your work surface and turn out the dough. Knead VERY briefly by hand, then form the dough into a ball. Wrap the dough in plastic and let it rest and chili in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or overnight. .

Lightly flour your work surface and use a rolling pin to roll the dough out to a 12-inch circle. Place the dough in a 10 1/2 inch tart pan with a removable bottom, Press the edges into the sides of the pan. It is important to press the dcugh evenly into every nook and corner. Fold the excess dough inside to reinforce the rim. Put the tart in the refrigerator for 15 minutes
.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Prick the bottom of the tart with a fork. Lay a piece of aluminum foil on the the bottom of the tart shell and add about 1 cup of dried beans, or use pie weights. Bake for 30 minutes, then lift out the foil and beans and bake for another 10 minutes. or until the pastry is lightly golden.

Beat the egg white with 1 tablespoon of water and use this to brush the bottom and sides of the pastry.

Squeeze the roasted garlic cloves out of their skins into a large bowl. Beat in the eggs and the cheeses, along with salt and pepper to taste.

Place the tart shell on a cookie sheet and pour the egg mixture into the shell, filling it three-quarters of the way. Carefully transfer to the oven and bake for 3o minutes The tart should still jiggle slightly In the center; it will set up as it cools.

To make the tomato salad:
Mix the tomato slices with the olives, basil, and orange zest. Drizzle with a 2-count of oil: season with salt and pepper and gently mix.

Remove the ring from the springform pan and then slide the tart off the base and onto a plate. Let the tart cool to room temperature. Cut it into wedges and drizzle with a little olive oil and a few turns of freshly ground black pepper. Spoon some of the tomato salad onto each place and put a slice of tart on top,