Acorn Squash Soup with Bacon and Sage Crisps

I've made it to week three of my once-a-week soup recipe plan.  Yes, I know, I've seen the pattern; three weeks and three pureed veggie soups (week one: Ginger Carrot Soup with Coconut and Miso and week two: Broccoli Soup with Blue Cheese Toasts) and now the acorn squash.  If I manage a week four recipe, I'll have to try something different.

It's just so easy with the wonderful fall veggies available this time of year (and available right in my own garden ... well, cold storage now).  In addition to the acorn squash that I grew, the sage was picked fresh from the herb garden.  And these crispy sage leaves?!  Sooooo delicious.  I'll remember to make extra next time as I had nibbled several on their own before the soup was served.

Ingredients:
3 lbs acorn squash, halved and seeded
3 slices bacon
1/2 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 carrot, diced
Fresh sage leaves
Vegetable stock

Bake the squash at 350 degrees F until tender, 30-40 minutes. When cool enough to touch, peel and cut into chunks.

Cook the bacon until crisp in a frying pan.  Set aside bacon to use as a garnish, then transfer 1 Tbsp of bacon fat (or olive oil if you prefer) into a dutch oven or other soup pot.

Saute onion, garlic and carrot until onion is translucent.  Add in squash, 7-8 sage leaves and 3 cups vegetable stock.  Simmer about 30 minutes.







Remove all but 2 sage leaves and discard.  Puree soup mixture.  Season with S&P.  If soup is too thick, add more stock (I added another 1 cup).

Sage Crisps:  Reheat bacon fat (or heat 2 Tbsp olive oil).  Fry fresh sage leaves about 1-2 minutes, until they turn dark green. 








Serve soup hot with crumbled bacon and sage crisps.

Pasta with White Wine, Lemon, Basil and Tomato

 

The basil plants are definitely done for the year. They survived a couple of light frosts a week or two ago but have simply been neglected lately.  I did manage to get in one last taste of the fresh basil in one of my favourite pasta dishes not long ago.  This light and summery pasta was perfect during this recent bout of warm weather we’ve been having.  And I suspect it’s the last of the tomatoes as well, although I have a single cherry tomato plant that continues to offer a few gems every day or two.

A friend way back in my Vancouver days made a similar pasta dish for a few friends and I remember thinking how delicious and fresh-tasting it was.  And that was with store-bought tomatoes and basil … it is taken to a whole new level with produce straight from your backyard.

Her version had angel hair pasta which is great with such a delicate sauce.  I prefer spaghetti, and I’ve added lemon zest and likely a lot more garlic.

Makes 3-4 servings.

Ingredients:

Spaghetti

3 large garlic cloves, minced

½ cup white wine

¼ cup fresh lemon juice

Zest of 1 lemon

1 fresh large tomato, diced

Basil leaves, at least 1 cup loosely packed

Parmesan cheese, grated

The dish comes together very quickly.  Start your pasta water boiling, and once the pasta has been added, then start the sauce.  

Heat a large sauté pan and add 1 Tbsp of olive oil.  Add garlic and sauté very briefly.  You do not want it to colour at all, so after just a minute or two, add in the white wine.  Allow to cook down to about half its volume, then add the lemon juice and zest.  At this point, just let it simmer away for a few minutes while waiting for the pasta.

When pasta is ready, add to the pan along with the diced tomato and basil leaves.  If needed (to be sure you have enough sauce) add some pasta liquid.  Add S&P and toss to mix it together.  Sprinkle in a handful or two of parmesan cheese to taste.  Serve immediately.

Winter Storage 2013

Aside from some Brussels Sprouts that have yet to mature, and spring onions and swiss chard that seem to want to grow forever, I have pretty much wrapped up the vegetable harvest for the year.  

The last item was the potatoes which I finally got around to digging up last weekend.   

I think I did okay for my first year at this property … but not great.  In the past, I’ve tended to rely on good old nature to make things happen.  And although I will never grow vegetables other than organically, I know there are plenty of methods I can follow or natural fertilizers I could be using. 

I would certainly appreciate any useful tips for improving yield organically (in an Eastern Ontario environment) if anyone out there has good experience.  And I’ll be studying up on this throughout the winter.

Potatoes

The potato plants that I grew in containers in the greenhouse were semi-successful.  Because I started earlier in the greenhouse, I had an even earlier harvest of new potatoes – and I wasn’t expecting large potatoes in the containers since I harvested them early.  But I did not get very many in each container.  And I was definitely expecting the potatoes in the garden to be larger. 

These, for example, were harvested just a few weeks ago so not exactly early.  This is about 6 pounds of already cured and very small Blue Russians and Red Chieftains.  Yes, they are sitting in egg cartons, that's how small they are!

Fingerling Potatoes Curing

And I have another pound or two of those plus some Yukon Gold still drying out. I also have a few pounds of fingerlings.  Fingerlings are absolutely my favourite potato.  And as much as I like eating little baby fingerlings, they do grow bigger and taste just as good.  However, these were only harvested last weekend and stayed fairly small.

So I have about 10 pounds of potatoes for winter storage and I recently gave away 3 pounds to a friend.  I’m sure I’ve eaten several pounds as well over the past few months.  But I had over 30 plants and should have had a much larger yield than this!  

Winter Squash

As with the potatoes, I had a reasonable amount of winter squash to eat and give away with some left for storage that I can use throughout the winter.  But as with the potatoes, I only have this many because I had so many plants.  The fact is only about 6 pumpkins made it to harvest out of 12 plants (pathetic, right?).  Acorn squash was much more productive, but it still took 6 plants to get about 14 squash.  Butternut was kind of in between – 6 plants and 10 squash harvested.  Not even 2 per plant!  And really small too.

Other

Summer squash: 15 1-cup bags of grated zucchini in the freezer;

Borlotti Beans: Didn’t have many plants, so was thrilled just to have the 2 cups or so that are in the freezer;

Hot Peppers: I have a few dozen in various stages of drying.  Most were used fresh or pickled;

Okra: Didn’t grow enough to eat but grew them to produce more seeds for next year;

Onions: Complete failure, didn’t even have any to eat (aside from a handful of scraggly looking things);

Strawberries: Several pounds of frozen berries bagged up.

Preserves

I canned various fruits and vegetables over the past month couple of months.  I wish I'd had more cucumbers for pickling and the amount of salsa I made won't last a few months let alone to next year's harvest.  But overall I'm pretty happy with what I accomplished.

 

 

List of 2013 Preserves (and links to the blog post):

 

Quick Dill Pickles

Zucchini and Garlic Scape Relish

Balsamic Raspberry Jam

Red Wine and Herb Tomato Sauce

Stewed Onions and Tomatoes

Pickled Hot Peppers

Caramel Apple Pie Filling

Tomato Jam

Crab Apple Sauce

Pickled Garlic

Canned Whole Tomatoes