Why Hello there! And welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe! I’m your host-who’s-not-quite-a-ghost, Jon O’Guin. Brief apology for missing last Thursday’s post, we’ll talk about what happened in a moment, but first let’s bait the hook for all of you ignoring the text of the blog and going straight for the food: Today, I’m forging my own way by fusing recipes Frankenstein-style (and before you even TRY to nerd flex on me, I know it’s the doctor’s name, I was REFERENCING the Doctor’s actions, not the monster’s form.) and making a soup that’s certainly du jour. So if you wanna skip the chit-chat and get straight to the sip-sap, click this link and move on. Everybody else, let’s talk Squash, Beer, Pain, and the difficulty of aiming for a target you can’t even see.

Delayed By Dolor

It’s not SUPER relevant to today’s conversation, other than as a partial reason for why I don’t do some steps later, but it’s worth calling out that, at the time that I cancelled Thursday’s post, I had not actually BEGUN to experience the full discomfort of my new injury. If you didn’t read it: we are 90% sure that I “pulled” a muscle in my back, which (I did not know) is functionally interchangeable with “strained a muscle”, or, to some extent “tore a muscle”: a pulled or strained muscle is one that has been stretched too far, physically straining or even tearing it.

Like snapping laffy-taffy, these are the veins of our spines.

And while it wasn’t pleasant Thursday afternoon, I was functionally BED-RIDDEN come Friday. My stride was halved and halting, any twist or tilt of my torso spiked pain in my back, and even when I WASN’T doing anything wrong, I would have occasional spasms for seemingly no reason. And these things SUCKED. My reputation with pain is mixed (and declining as I age, poor me), but if a spasm or twist caught me unawares it was almost impossible to stop from crying out. Over the course of the day, I had 30-50 yelps, stifled grunts, feral hogs, and strained whines of failing control. And it turns out, it was at least partly my fault!

Broadly speaking, it was COMPLETELY my fault, as the back strain was acquired not during some great feat of heroism or athleticism, but, by all appearances, by sleeping with my blankets arranged differently. But I don’t count that, as a deal I made years ago means my unconscious body legally belongs to cthonic entities whose names I cannot divulge, per our arrangement. No, turns out that, while the advice of icing a sprained muscle CAN be good, it’s mostly only if there’s already swelling or redness, and is best performed on muscles you don’t HAVE to use while icing them. In my case, I was tightening a damaged muscle used involuntarily to stabilize and maneuver my core, meaning it was, rather obviously, HARDER TO MOVE.

A bit of stretching, and a quick trip to urgent care on Saturday (my doctor’s office was closed) where they said “yeah, sounds like you pulled something, here’s some low-grade meds, take it easy.” Which I did. And let me tell you, a single extra-strength Ibuprofen pill and a muscle relaxer that evening brought me to functionally back to normal come Saturday night. All of which (along with some other details/conflicts) meant that I couldn’t START the recipe for today’s post until Sunday at about 3 PM. Meaning that my FIRST act after getting my back medicated was attempting to slide something in under the wire.

LIMBO TIME! FUCK YOUR SPINE!
(note: My spine itself is fine, it just rhymes with more things)

What motivated this? Well, that’s a story.

Delusions of Grandeur

And THAT is a lie. Not the title, I almost certainly have delusions of grandeur probably. I mean that It’s really not much of a story of what motivated today’s recipe. I already TOLD you it, secretly. Back in the Cash Brewing 2 post for Adventures in Alcohol, I quoted Nate referencing a beer dinner they had, which had a Brown Ale Butternut Squash soup. And when Nate said that in person , Drunk me perked up a little: I hadn’t been at that dinner (I don’t remember exactly why, I THINK it took place while I was in Leavenworth for Oktoberfest. I just remember finding left-overs in the fridge and eating hops. Like, the plant that gives beer bitterness. It’s even MORE bitter than you’d assume, but not all that bad), but Nate had, at a couple points, referenced how much he liked the soup from that dinner. “Brown Ale and Butternut Squash,” I thought. “That can’t be all that hard to make.”

You don’t scare me, squash.

Which, as noted earlier, is probably a strong indication of my delusions of grandeur. Like, I watch a show on Bon Appetit where one of their employees (Chris, the “Iron Man” of the crew) tries to recreate dishes without ever seeing them: he’s allowed to feel them, taste them, smell them, but he can’t SEE them. And he, a professionally trained chef who works in devising recipes, and is renowned IN HIS FIELD for his amazingly precise and refined palate, tends to hit around an 80% accuracy mark. Meanwhile, I, a semi-hemi-professional cook at best, was attempting to recreate a professionally made dinner that not only could I not see, but could not taste, smell, or touch. I was making a dish based solely on the information that it possessed a specific beer, a type of squash, and, after some research, was not particularly cheesy.

So I threw this probably impossible task up on a list of “things I’m thinking about making” for this fall (I write a new one of these basically every 2-3 months), and last Thursday mentioned to my family that I had some ideas on stuff to cook for the next few weeks, and had them look them over. Now, normally this achieves literally nothing, as I receive no feedback on what they would like/find interesting, and have to make the calls myself later. This seemed to be much the same, except that I followed up the list with a question several hours later that evening: “IF we want to use the same beer for that recipe, how do we get it? Does Cash Brewing have cans?” The answer was No, they only have growlers. But somehow, asking that question made this recipe the locked-on target. Which Is why I don’t get to do “Fry-ght Night” the Monday before Halloween, and instead have made soup.

Ooooh, Spooky.

And I’ve already used up too much time describing the process to really get into the history of butternut squash today…actually, I DO have time, because the history of Butternut Squash is super short: Squash are really easy to inter-breed (hell, it can be hard STOPPING them from interbreeding) and have been a staple food for indigenous peoples in the Americas for centuries. Butternut in particular, however, was grown in the 1940’s (around 1944) in Massachusetts by a farmer named Charles Leggett. He interbred Hubbard and Gooseneck squash, and brought the resulting plant to a nearby Agricultural Experiment station. He said “it’s smooth as butter, and sweet as a nut, so I call it Butternut”. The Lab took the seeds, found that the variety bred true (ie, made more butternuts. Not always guaranteed with weird seeds) and Boom, a star was born.

Anywho, let’s fuse some shit together.

The Picasso of Pumpkin

Picasso once said (hilariously maybe quoting someone else) “Good artists copy, while great artists steal”. And since we just established that I am (or at least believe myself to be) a great, perhaps even GREATEST artist, I of course stole a LOT of shit in making this recipe. Also a lot of shit went wrong, and somehow my step-sister/fiancée ended up dead. That’s what happens when you play God, I suppose.

FUCK YOU, ZEUS! I COMMAND THE LIGHTNING NOW!

So, as a rule, if you’re going to rattle the very foundations of the firmament with your blasphemous acts, you gotta start by stealing from the best. The main framework for today’s recipe comes from a Thomas Keller recipe for Butternut Squash Soup with Brown Butter, Sage, and Nutmeg Crème Fraiche, and before you get your hopes up, literally nothing after “Soup” from that list is included. (I was actually GOING to include most of it, but couldn’t find crème fraiche at the store, Nate vetoed the Brown Butter since we were already running late, and I replaced the fried sage with another crispy topping.) LET’S DANCE.

The First step is to prep the butternut, which to do so I’m going to take some time and make the men in the room as uncomfortable as possible: Butternut squash has a bulb and a neck, making it look something like a disturbingly thick penis and scrotum. I bring this up because the first step of this recipe is to cut off the scrotum of the squash, cut it in half, and scrape the seed from within it. This freshly spilt and shorn scrotes get oiled, seasoned, stuffed a sprig of sage, and roasted at 350 degrees for about an hour. (My balls were smaller than most men’s, since I was using two smaller peni-squash, rather than one of the proper size, so mine were done in 45 minutes.)

I should really see a dermatologist. This mole looks bad.

While the scrotes sweat it out in the hot box, it’s time to dice the dicks. Peel off the skin and pale outer edge of the squash, and then dice the remaining squash into roughly ½” cubes. It’s fine if some are smaller: this soup gets pureed, so the important thing is they’re small enough to cook through. One weird thing I found is that my squash dicks wept…something. Turns out that butternut squash has a sap-like liquid that oozes out and dries when it’s cut. Which, since I just cut off the top halves and wandered off, meant I came back to hardened balls of squash sap on my decapitated dicks.

Yeah, this is NOT water. It’s firm, and sticky.

It’s perfectly harmless, however, and can be wiped off fairly easily. Weird squash-dick-liquids handeled, next is a mix of onions, shallots, leeks, and carrots. Or, you can be like us, and the guy who READ the recipe will be off looking for crème fraiche while someone else grabs produce off of his scribbled notes, so no one got shallots. (in their defense, I thought it was an either/or thing, so I literally wrote it as “onions/shallots”) So instead of equal parts shallots, carrots and onions to 2 parts leeks, it’s now more carrot, more onion, more leek!

I feel like I’ve made too many dick jokes to lean on the “leek-leak” parallel in that regard, and I don’t want to put in the effort for a political joke to throw off my ongoing Frankenstein impression. So…WEEP, MORTALS, BECAUSE THESE ONIONS WERE SURPRISINGLY POTENT.

This is basically a mirepoix, with leek instead of celery, and you’re just sweating the veggies for a bit in vegetable oil to get some base aromas laid down, and to soften up them up a little. Once that’s done, it’s time for 4 cups of squash, and 6 smashed garlic cloves. (We actually ended up with 5 cups of squash, since, again, two small dicks instead of 1 big one, so we just kinda futzed stuff to work). Toss them in, and get them a couple minutes just to mingle.

50 Shades of Orange.

The next step is to add some honey to add a bit of sweetness. Which I did not do. And it wasn’t JUST because the open container of honey was in another room and I was lazy. Oh no, there was something like a PLAN. The reason for the plan will be revealed later, but for now, just know that I decided to use something more fall-focused than honey: Whisky-barrel-aged Maple Syrup.

Ooh, there’s Whiskey in the Jar.

I mean, we all know maple goes with butternut squash. And since I was planning on adding a dark beer to the soup, while not add a little alcoholic complexity with the whiskey-aged stuff? (Also, I’m fairly certain we only have the barrel-aged stuff and like, Mrs Buttersworth, so if we wanted actual maple syrup, this was the only call)

Then in goes stock. While Keller’s uses vegetable stock, the recipes that added beer used a meat-based one, so I went with that. If you’re vegetarian/vegan, you can certainly stick with the veggies. The recipe also calls for a bouquet garni, which, if you’re not educated in French soups, is a small packet of herbs and flavoring agents tied together or held in cheesecloth, to allow them to be easily pulled out at the end of cooking.

Seen here, with an extra string to ensure easy removal.

A quick simmer to soften up the chunks of diced squash, then you add In the flesh of the roasted squash (scraped out of its skin) and leave it to simmer for half an hour or so. You just want everthing to start to intermingle.

While it’s simmering, it’s time for the topping. As I noted earlier, this is a pretty easy recipe to keep vegan: other than the broth, there’s no meat or animal products. Which is great for a vegan, but not so great for a Sunday dinner for omnivores. Also, with the fried sage gone (I wasn’t going to try and deep-fry herbs while making a soup. That just SCREAMS “Time to burn myself” to me) I needed something to give the meal a bit of crunch. If only there was some meat that can end up crunchy, is associated with fall, and tastes good with butternut squash, maple…and basically everything.

Ooh, Evan Willaims. That’s a competitively priced whiskey.

Yes, Bacon. And, weirdly, while I had definitely decided “oh, it should be maple bacon”, the ONLY maple bacon we could find in the store was Maple & Bourbon bacon…which made our choice of barrel-aged maple syrup for the sweetener all the more appropriate!

Just fry the bacon until crisp (to free up stove space, I used the oven method, which I honestly kind of prefer: it’s slower, but pretty clean and easy.) and then chop it up into bite-sized chunks.

Meanwhile, it’s time for the finishing touch: The beer. Which…we didn’t have. We had BEER, mind you, but the brewery was changing out their equipment, so they actually didn’t have the exact beer from the original dinner, so we grabbed a porter instead. (meaning that I set out to make a recipe I knew TWO ingredients for, and couldn’t get HALF of them) Was that the right call? I don’t know. We also grabbed a Scwharzbier, but on tasting the two, I thought the porter was a little closer to what we wanted. You want to add the beer at the end, so it doesn’t totally cook-out, or get too bitter. I poured it in while pureeing the soup with an immersion blender. Once it was all incorporated, I tasted it for seasoning, added a little more stock because mine was thick from the extra cup of squash, and finally ladled it out and served it.

Visually stunning. Brown-Orange with brown bits.
WHY DID I PICK AN ORANGE BOWL?

And it was pretty good. While, again, I didn’t have a specific dish to compare it against, I thought it was a deep mixture of bitter and sweet, in an enjoyable and somewhat surprising way. Nate gave it an unqualified “pretty good”, with an inflection saying he too was surprised to not hate it. Our mother thought it got a little too sweet toward the bottom of the bowl, but still liked it over all. So as far as culinary creations stitiched together in defiance of the laws of God and man…coulda been a lot worse!

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THURSDAY: IT’S HALLOWEEN, SO LET’S TALK ABOUT SOMETHING HALLOWEEN RELATED. SPOOKY FOOD? CANDY? WHO KNOWS!

MONDAY: PROBABLY FRIES.

And now, the

Recipe

Dark Ale Butternut Squash Soup

Serves 6

Ingredients

3.5 to 4 lbs butternut squash

2 tbsps canola oil

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

2-4 sprigs sage

1 cup thinly sliced leeks, white and light green parts only

¾ cup thinly sliced carrots

¾ cup thinly sliced onions

6 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed

2 tablespoons maple syrup

2 cups beef stock + 3 cups chicken stock, plus extra if necessary (substitute 5 cups vegetable stock if vegetarian. Or really, just go with any mix of stocks that you like that totals 5 cups, and have a little more on hand)

8 sprigs thyme, 1 sprig Rosemary, 2 bay leaves, and 1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns, all wrapped in a bouquet garni packet made of 1 green leek leaf (I also had to wrap my leek leaf in cheese cloth)

1 cup dark beer or brown ale

8 oz maple bacon, cooked and chopped (optional)

Preparation

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and line a baking sheet with alumininum foil.
Spilt your Butternut squash(es, if you needed 2 to get the right weight), cutting the neck off, and splitting the bulb. Scrape out the seeds and…gunk in the bulb. Rub the bulb halves with 1 tbsp of canola oil, season with salt and pepper, and place a sprig of sage inside each seed cavity. Place cut side down on the foil-lined baking sheet, and roast until completely tender, 45 minutes to 1 hour.
While the bulbs are roasting, peel the remaining butternut squash necks, and dice to ½ inch or smaller cubes. Also, prep any components you haven’t already: slice your onions, wrap up your bouquet garni, etc. Before proceeding to the next step, you’ll have to wait for the squash to be finished roasting. Let it cool, and then scoop the flesh from the skins.
Heat a large pot with the remaining tablespoon of canola oil over medium-high heat. To the heated pot, add the leeks, onions, and carrots, cooking for 5-6 minutes, until softened. Then reduce the heat to medium, adding the smashed Garlic cloves and diced (uncooked) squash, along with 1 ½ tsps. of salt and ½ a tsp of ground black pepper, cooking for 3 minutes to integrate the flavors. Add the maple syrup and cook an additional 2-3 minutes, stirring frequently. Then add the stock and bouquet garni. Bring the pot to a simmer, and cook for 10-15 minutes until the squash is tender.
Once the squash is tenderized, add the roasted squash, and simmer the pot gently for about 30 minutes, allowing flavors to meld, and stirring to incorporate. Then, remove the bouquet garni, add the beer, and blend the soup. You can do this in the pot with an immersion blender, or in batches in a normal blender.
Ladle the pureed soup into bowls, and top with the crispy bacon (or other crunchy topping), and serve hot.