Squash soup!

It's FALL!!

Tis the season for beautiful soups. Here's the first one (of many) that I will be making this fall. I give you, Alton Brown's Squash Soup.

A few small changes from me:

1. I have no idea what sort of squash I used because in Switzerland, each kind of squash is just called courge. I have identified pattypan, spaghetti and potentially pumpkin, but these slices of "courge" that they sell in the store is still a mystery to me. It was a brilliant orange and baked up beautifully in the oven. It certainly had a sphaghetti squash like stringy consistency (not solid like a Japanese kaboucha or a pumpkin.) Very strange.

2. I used chicken stock that I had made myself. I'm starting to do this more often because a) it's easy and freezes nicely b) chicken stock has a ton of salt and preservatives and c) whole chicken is cheaper and more fun to cook with.

3. I left out the ginger despite having some, and the soup was still great.

I thought this recipe was a good starting place because it's JUST squash and a little cream and butter. Looking forward to seeing what celery, onions, potatoes and other things do to it!

Shrimp Risotto

Another one from the pioneer woman! I'm getting to really like her style of super long posts with step by step photos, it's handy to see what hers looked like at each step. And this one didn't have the recipe written out normally at the end but it was fine because I didn't really need it.

This shrimp risotto was great - creamy and tasty like regular risotto, but no cream or cheese, so it was slightly more healthful (still plenty of butter in there). And I really liked how they cut up the shrimp to go in it so you had more bites with shrimp. Now I have more than one kind of risotto in my repertoire. Yay!