Butternut Squash Soup with Goat Cheese

November 5, 2008 – 10:08 pm

Butternut Squash

I got the outline of this recipe from a fellow on the Fixed Gear Gallery forum. Because of the quantity of CSA leeks I had lingering around the crisper, I modified it slightly. It’s a simple recipe with few ingredients, but hearty and slightly sweet, with a faint tang from the goat cheese.

  • 2 butternut squash
  • olive oil
  • 2 leeks
  • butter
  • ~6 cups stock
  • 200g goat cheese
  • ¼ cup cream
  • milk
  • salt & pepper

Cut the squash in half and scrape out the pulp and seeds. Brush the cut surface with olive oil, sprinkle on some salt and peppr (I added some dried sage too) and place on a baking sheet. Roast in the oven until very tender; 45 minutes to an hour. Once the squash is done, pull it out and let it cool for a few minutes.

While the squash is cooling, cut off and discard the green part of the leeks. Clean the white ends and then chop them up. Melt a few tablespoons of butter over medium-low heat, then add the leeks and cook slowly. Meanwhile, scoop all the squash flesh out of the skins. Once the leeks are well softened, dump in the squash and the stock.

The amount of stock is somewhat variable. I used about six cups, which resulted in a pretty thick soup. More of a thin puree. Add more if you like to sip your soup. Anyway, after adding the stock, bring the soup to a simmer and cook it for fifteen minutes or so. Then puree it in a food processor or blender until smooth.

Pour the blended soup back into the pot and stir in the goat cheese. Keep stirring as the cheese melts until blends into the soup. Add a bit of cream, and some milk if the soup needs to be thinned. Also salt and pepper to taste.

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Suckin’ it down

October 13, 2008 – 8:20 pm

I’ve had a pretty set filing system for quite a few years. Bank statements, paid bills, and anything else more important than the average newspaper get filed in the appropriate slot in the cabinet. I’ve cleaned things out once or twice, but in general that just seems like more effort than its worth, so the folders have slowly gotten fatter over the years. This probably seems pretty dull thing to talk about, and it is, but it’s also what allowed me to go back over the four years of electric bills I’ve paid in my current apartment and analyze how much electricity I use. Each bill states the kilowatt-hours used in the previous month, so after ten minutes of leafing through them, I had all the data in a spreadsheet where I could take a look at it.

My yearly usage has been going up, but seems to be leveling off. There was a big jump from 2005 to 2006 and a smaller one from 2006 to 2007. 2008 isn’t complete, of course, but I’m on track for about the same amount as 2007, unless something unusual happens.

My yearly electricity usage, 2005 to 2008

Averaging out the data by month also leads to some insights. There seem to be two major seasonal effects at work. Running the AC in the summer has the biggest impact, causing spike in July and August. I also want to say that there’s a smaller bump in the winter due to the increased need for artificial light, but the data’s a little too uneven to say for sure. In particular, I’m not sure why it’s lower in September than in October, and why the trend is downward from October through December. Perhaps it’s because I’m often away for the last week or so of December.

My average electrical consumption, by month

The big picture is that I consume about 160 kWh per month, or 1,900 kWh per year. According to government statistics, the average household in Illinois consumes 770 kWh per month, and for the U.S. as a whole, that goes up to 920 kWh. I’m way below average, but I probably shouldn’t brag too much, since I have some built-in advantages which I can’t really take credit for. I don’t have to account for a washer, dryer, dishwasher, hot water, or heat. The only major appliances that show up on my electric bill are my refrigerator, my AC, and my 1400W espresso machine.

What could I do to get this figure lower? I’ve already replaced most of my bulbs with compact fluorescents. The only incandescents I still have either are used rarely, or are harder than the average bulb to replace (odd base sizes, on dimmer switches, or decorative bare bulbs).

My computer stays on (although asleep) all day. If I shut it off while I’m asleep or at work, I could probably save a few watts. Only a few though, since according to Apple in sleep mode it uses just over two watts, only slightly more than it uses when it’s off.

Addressing “vampire power” (devices such as power adapters which consume energy even if they’re not being actively used) might save me a few more watts. I have a bunch of little electronic devices that don’t get used very often, but stay plugged in all the time. If I plugged these into a single power strip then I could turn them off when I wasn’t using them. Something like a Kill A Watt meter, or its DIY equivalent, would allow me to measure how much power is actually getting used by these devices. I’m going to think about this and see if it would be practical for me. If I have to dig around under my desk half a dozen times a day just to save a few watts, it’s not going to be worth the effort.

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Oh, that’s RICH!

September 4, 2008 – 10:39 pm

I’m going to try very hard not to overload B&S with political crap—who really needs more of the stuff?—but this is just too good to pass up:

The Daily Show at it’s finest. The researchers on their team who come up with this stuff do great work.

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Basic Carrot Soup

August 16, 2008 – 10:01 am

Finally! There will be some soup on Bread & Soup! Maybe, someday, there will be bread too. But for now, just soup. Each CSA shipment for the last two weeks has included a couple pounds of fine-looking carrots. I knew I had no hope of eating them all unless I did something to them in bulk. Conveniently, last week’s CSA newsletter included a recipe for carrot soup that didn’t include any exotic ingredients that would require me to make a trip to the grocery store. It turned out pretty good, both warm on the day I made it and cold several days later. So, if you too have more carrots than you know what to do with, here you go. I modified the recipe slightly, based on what I had on hand and my experiences making it.

  • 4 T butter
  • 1 small onion, finely chopped
  • 1 lb carrots, finely chopped
  • 1 ½ t coriander
  • 4 c broth (vegetable or chicken)
  • Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a soup pot, add the chopped onion, and sauté until the onion is softened; about 5 minutes. Add the carrot and coriander, and pour in enough broth to make the mixture kind of soupy (about 1 cup). Cook until the carrots are soft; about 30 minutes. Take off the heat and let cool, then purée the mixture and return to the pot. Add the remainder of the broth and salt and pepper to taste.

That’s it! If you’ve chop the onion and carrot in the food processor too, it’s dead simple. You’ll spend more time peeling the carrots than on any other step.

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Freedom

July 31, 2008 – 6:59 pm

Lately I’ve been reading a history of Chicago, Chicago: Crossroads of American Enterprise1. It’s a popular history, published in 1944, and it follows the style and approach that you’d expect of a book of that vintage. The prose tends towards a purplish hue at times, and “man” is used as a synonym for “people.” But it’s giving me a good overview of the city’s past, filling in some blanks, and it recently provided a passage which seemed particularly appropriate to today. These two paragraphs come as the author reflects over the final departure of the local Indian tribes from the Chicago area after the defeat of Black Hawk:

We Americans are a freedom-loving people. We’ll fight and die for freedom lest we lose it. We’ve proved that in the past. We’re proving it again. But loving freedom when it is your freedom that’s at stake is pretty common with people all over the world. We may say that some men have got a way of thinking that makes them more independent, more aware of individuality, than others, and, along with some other democratic nations who believe in the individual, we can lay claim to that. We don’t like the regimentation and the mass-thinking—or lack of thinking—that some people fall for, and I don’t believe we could be made to like it, no, not even in that thousand years that Hitler once was talking of. And, as history sets out the record, we haven’t done too badly, lined up with the rest of the world. We’ve respected freedom sometimes even when it wasn’t our freedom that was at stake, as in the case of the Phillipines. But where the Indians were concerned—

All right, that was a long while back, and people had a different way of looking at it then, and recently our government has gone way, way ahead in doing right by the Indians alive today. Still, let it be written down that freedom, not ours, but somebody else’s, suffered in this country. It’s worth writing down. it should be written down all over the world in every country where some other people’s freedom suffered—and that would mean a lot of writing down. But maybe it would help to keep it clear to us what freedom-loving ought to mean. Freedom-respecting might be a better phrase. We’ll need to be remembering that in the long, long years to come, getting along with the rest of the world.

The word “freedom” gets tossed around a lot these days, mostly to describe something that the US brings to other people. We do this because, after all, this is a free country, the leader of the free world, so who would know more about freedom than we do? But freedom often gets expanded for one group at the expense of another, as was the case for the Indians, and since the publication of this book, the US has had a tendency to pursue our own freedoms a little too diligently. It’s a long road, especially for a country like ours, to go from freedom-loving to freedom-respecting, and we’re not there yet.

1No longer in print, but, interestingly, available in a scanned and OCR’d version online at the Internet Archive.

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