{"id":1451,"date":"2015-07-21T20:44:37","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T00:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/?p=1451"},"modified":"2015-07-21T20:44:37","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T00:44:37","slug":"cream-of-fill-in-the-vegetable-soup-strikes-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/cream-of-fill-in-the-vegetable-soup-strikes-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Cream of “fill in the vegetable” Soup Strikes Again!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love soup.\u00a0 It’s one of those things you can make as a vegetarian and no one feels like they’re missing out.\u00a0 It’s also now closely associated with warm the companionship of friends.\u00a0 My husband’s family, growing up, was a military family, which frequently meant being away from family at the holidays.\u00a0 Since there were always lots of military folks around in the same boat, and because my mother-in-law is one of the most hospitable people I know, they frequently threw open their house on Christmas Day to those without families nearby.\u00a0 Chili was the traditional food for them, because it could be thrown together in a Crock-Pot and left to simmer all day for any and all who fancied some.\u00a0 When my husband and I found ourselves far from our families at the Holidays, we decided to continue the tradition.\u00a0 There was just one problem, neither of us was crazy about chili.\u00a0 So, the Soup-a-thon was born.\u00a0 I think last Christmas was the first year in nearly 10 that we had not hosted a gathering of friends.\u00a0 I missed it very much. Still, I keep on souping.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite soups to make is Cream of Butternut Squash.\u00a0 It’s rich, and slightly sweet, and all-together comforting. Though it is my favorite, I have found that there are very few vegetables that do not taste wonderful cooked with onion and butter and cream (Broccoli is definitely one of them.\u00a0 Trust me on this one.)<\/p>\n

This has been the summer of yellow squash.\u00a0 The area we live in is an agricultural one, and there are several programs to encourage buying local produce.\u00a0 We participate in one called The Produce Box<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s sort of a vegetable basket of the week club.\u00a0 The last two weeks have seen a lot of squash and quite a bit of corn. Then last weekend our neighbor, who has a beautiful garden, brought us a bag full of cucumbers and… yellow squash.\u00a0 I pickled the cucumbers and some of the squash (softer than a cucumber pickle, but still tasty), but I still had a bunch.\u00a0 I’m not a huge fan of yellow squash.\u00a0 It’s texture and taste are inferior to zucchini when sauteed or put in a sauce, so I started searching for different ways of preparing it. I turned some of the squash into a savory cheesecake (I’ll write that one up at a later date, after I get some pictures.), but still I had more.<\/p>\n

So… Time for soup!\u00a0 I used some carrots I had in the fridge, and cut the kernels off some of the cobs in our Produce Box.\u00a0 Below is the resulting, rather tasty, recipe.\"Cream<\/a><\/p>\n