Category Archives: food

The Kitchen Illiterate and Laura Make it on Slashfood!

Posted on by

Laura’s “Stuffed Squash galore: Carnivale and Delicata” Kitchen Illiterate food blog post from November 30, 2008 just made in on Slashfood’s “Feast Your Eyes” column.

Exciting not only because it’s Slashfood, but also because Laura’s food photography is being recognized as well as her creative recipes. Here’s the screen shot:

Kitchen Illiterate on Slashfood

Update [12/10]: They did it again!

Sauteed leeks from Laura’s squash pasta:

Chicken Florentine Recipe

Posted on by

There’s fresh spinach in the fridge looking for a meal other than salad so I did a little searching for “chicken spinach cream sauce” which led me to a bunch of recipes about “chicken florentine“. Now who am I going to trust more:  the food network, cooks.com, southernfood.about.com, or some blogger? What’s Southern Food got to do with anything “Florentine”? TV Food Network? Too much Giada, Paula, Ray-Ray. As for cooks.com, I can’t seriously take any recommendations from what’s practically a domain name squating site. As for the parent company of cooks.com, The FOURnet Information Network, its nice to see that they offer a $20 a month 56k dialup service.

But I digress, there is great recipe with pictures for chicken florentine over at The Kicthen Illiterate, a source you can trust.

Ginger & Butternut Squash Soup

Posted on by

Ingredients

  • 1 normal sized butternut squash (maybe 3lbs?)
  • 1 medium yellow onion
  • 4 lg. celery stalks
  • 3 carrots (not too big)
  • 3-4 cloves garlic
  • 1 large hand of ginger
  • 1 large hand of fresh ginger (when peeled and dices/grated should be about 1/3 sorta firmly packed)
  • 6 Cups chicken stock
  • As much unsalted butter and heavy cream as your conscience allows (at least 3 Tbs. butter and 1/2 pint heavy cream)
  • seasoning to taste: S&P; dried: ginger, nutmeg, cinamon (listed in decending order of proportions)

Prep work

  • Peel the squash (a cheap vegetable peeler works great), chop into chunks about 1 inch square (not literally, they’ll be all sorts of wacky shapes, just don’t make them to small or too big, sort of like this is good.
  • Peel the ginger. I usually just mince with a chefs knife, you could grate it too.
  • For the onion, celery and carrots you’re basically making a mirepoix, but instead of the clasic 2:1:1 proportions (2x onion, 1x celery an carrots) this one should be more like 1:1:1, or equal parts.
    • Clean and peel the carrots, wash the celery, peel the garlic.
    • Dice the onion carrots and celery into a larger version of a brunoise, or whatever depending on your knife skillz.
  • Thinly slice the garlic.

Cooking it up

  1. Put some butter in a large pot (something this size, though not that price, will do) over medium-ish heat, melt.
  2. Add your mirepoix and sweat it (cook over low heat letting the juices come out) when the onion and celery start to get tender (before they start turning transcluent) add the garlic and seasonings. You may want to add some more butter if the pan starts to dry out a bit.
  3. When you start smelling lovely garlic and things get a bit softer add the squash.
  4. Let the squash cook and mingle with the other flavors a bit (I’ll leave it up to you to decide when to stir things. People are all crazy about when they think they need to stir stuff)
  5. At some point you’re going to have to add the chicken stock, go ahead.
  6. Raise the heat, bringing it up to a simmer
  7. Simmer for a spell.
  8. At some point your going to be stiring that pot and you’ll notice the edges of the squash are getting rounded over, poke one. If it seems like you could split it in half with a wooden spoon and you wouldn’t make mashed squash in the process ad the cream.
  9. Adjust the seasoning (after you add cream or any unsalted dairy, you’ll always need to add some more salt)
  10. Pull it off, the heat.
  11. Transfer in small batches into blender or food processor, pulse until it is smooth and silky.
  12. Transfer all the pureed stuffs back into the pot (give it a rinse first at least, people!)
  13. Cook till it thickens some more (this is a matter of taste, but no one like baby food and we’re not making a broth, so its gotta be somewhere in between. It should definately coat the back of a spoon though)
  14. Serve with some toasted bread (and beer).

Now you just made a whole lot of soup, so you should have a plan for storing it. 1qt. mason jars work nicely. If you fill mason jars when the liquid is quite hot, leave the lids loose until while its in the ‘fridge until it cools. Otherwise you could have a mess on your hands.