Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Two people have asked for the recipe so far (one on LiveJournal and one in person), so here's what I remember of that creamy potato/squash soup. (One of these days I'll learn to take notes when I cook. But don't hold your breath -- I've been meaning to do that for years.) In any case, don't count on getting much in the way of units out of me for now -- most of the amounts listed are vague and aproximate and based on recollections a day or so later of fleeting impressions of how much was in my hand or flying into the pot, so quantities could be pretty far off. I was really tempted to just write "enough" for most of the spices, because that's how I perceived the amount -- the problem is that I don't know (yet) how I knew what "enough" was. (Of course for some of them I didn't put in enough the first time (sure beats the opposite), so I had to add more after tasting, which makes the amounts even less reliable.)

I think I at least remembered all the the spices I used... For some of the ones that I knew I'd thought about but couldn't remember whether I'd used, I had to go downstairs and sniff them just now to remember whether they went into the soup.

Come to think of it, forget about taking notes -- I should just videotape myself when I make something new if I might want to remember how I did it later. I just have to figure out where in the kitchen I can position the rather bulky video camera.

D'Glenn's Creamy Squash And Potato Soup, version 0.2

(I'm still tinkering with it.)

This filled a small crock-pot; a little over three quarts.

• Two small butternut squash or one large one.
• Three white potatoes
• Three medium-sized parsnips
• Three rather large carrots
• Three medium cloves of garlic, more or less to taste
• green chili peppers -- I used three little skinny ones that I don't know the name of (don't taste hot at all until they're cooked), coarsely chopped, but one or two serrano peppers (finely chopped) would have been much bettter (and I probably would have needed less basil and half as much fennel)
• One of those little trays of portabello mushrooms (what is that, 8 oz??)
• 2/3 Pint of heavy cream (I used the whole pint, but in retrospect I probably should have used 2/3 to 3/4)
• A few ounces of coconut milk (maybe 80-150 ml???)
• A wee pinch of ground cloves -- not enough to taste directly, which means not very much at all when it comes to cloves
• A splash of olive oil
• Handful of basil leaf
• Some fennel seed (uh, too much to call a pinch or two, not enough to call a small handful), cracked but not finely ground
• Some ground cardamom (maybe a cc?)
• two quick shakes of dill leaf
• generous pinch of thyme, though I'll probably leave that out next time
• ground cinnamon, but I don't remember how much
• ground nutmeg, a little more than the amount of cinnamon
• ground ginger (fresh would have been better but I didn't have any) -- two shakes. I probably could've used more.
• I don't remember whether I used any oregano or not -- it's probably not needed.
• I think I used some marjoram ... not as much as the basil, maybe as much as the dill
• crushed red pepper -- a couple large pinches, much less than most people who know me would expect
• ground black pepper -- I don't remember how much; I added more a couple of times after tasting the broth
• salt -- I don't remember how much, but I do remember that it took more than I thought it would to make it taste right
• dried juniper berries, about five (all I had left), chopped. Twice as much would've been better. I wanted to break them up but I didn't really want them ground, so I chopped each a couple of times with my big knife and that made fragments about the right size.
• <25ml whiskey ... probably about 15ml
• I didn't use any onion, but I bet half a medium-sized yellow onion, lightly browned in a skillet to bring out the sweetness, would've been a good addition.

Chop the parsnips as finely as you have the patience for and put them into the crock pot with at least enough water to cover them. Set the crock pot on high heat. Do this first; parsnips take a while to get as soft as we want for this soup. (I poured boiling water into the crock pot to shave a little on the heating time of the device.) If you're willing to give the parsnips an even bigger head start, you don't have to chop them up quite as small.

(Experimental variation -- I baked one of the parsnips with the squash before chopping it up, to see whether that would bring out the sweetness more without losing too much of the tanginess. It did make it sweeter but it also did make it less tangy.)

Finely grate the carrots. I used a hand grater; a food processor probably would have been the right tool, or maybe a blender (oh wait, I have a blender ... okay, next time). Add them to the water in the crock-pot.

Preheat oven to 450K (177C, 350F)

Halve the squash and scoop out the pulp and seeds.

Place the squash halves cut-side down in a baking dish. with a little bit of water. Cook 45 minutes in oven.

Chop the garlic kind of coarse. Throw it in the crock-pot.

Peel the potatoes and grate them using a coarse grater. Dump them into the crock-pot and add enough water so that everything is still covered.

Add a splash of olive oil and most of the spices to the crock-pot, holding back a bit on any you're not sure of, so you can tweak the mix later, after tasting.

Clean the mushrooms. Cut half of them into 1cm - 3cm chunks and throw them in the crock-pot.

Heat a skillet with a splash (1 tbsp?) of oil in it.

Cut the other half of the mushrooms into slices unless you got a package of pre-sliced ones. Saute the slices in the skillet, which should be hot by now. Cook them long enough on each side to brown and shrink just a tiny bit, but not much more than that -- not as dark as if you were grilling them for a portabello sandwich. I covered the skillet to speed this up a bit.

Chop the cooked mushrooms into chunks roughly the size of the raw ones, and throw them in the crock-pot.

Chop the peppers and set them aside to be added later. (Now you can wash the grater, cutting board, and knife if you're still waiting for the squash to cook.)

When the squash is cooked, remove it from the oven, flip over the halves, and rake the flesh out of the skin with a fork (thus breaking it up at the same time as you scoop it). Add it directly to the crock-pot.

Add water if needed to keep things soup-like, remembering to leave space for the cream.

Stir the contents of the crock pot and cover. Let it boil for an hour or so, then stir again and turn it to the low power setting. Check to see if the parsnips are soft and the potatoes dissolving nicely, and taste the broth to decide what spices to add more of. When you taste it, remember that you still have the peppers to add.

Add the chopped peppers sometime after the heat has been turned down.

Let it simmer for another couple of hours (more is probably better; I was feeling impatient and wanted to have it done before I went to bed).

Stir in the cream and the splash of whiskey sometime before you decide it's finished cooking -- pretty much any time between when you add the peppers and a half hour before you declare the soup done; I wanted the creaminess of the cream to permeate things but didn't want to cook the heck out of the cream, and I think I added the cream about an hour before I turned off the crock-pot.

The idea was to get the potatoes and carrots to dissolve as much as possible so that they became part of the creamy-starchy thickness of the soup instead of distinct vegetables, and for the parsnips to simply get soft enough to complement the overall texture -- the mushroom chunks should be what stands out texture-wise from everything else. Like most of the things I tend to make in a crock-pot, you can probably let this cook as long as you want as long as it's stirred once in a while.

The point of the peppers is their flavour, not heat. The ones I used worked well flavour-wise but didn't do everything I wanted -- I wanted the "nose" of the serrano flavour. Jalapeños would have been completely the wrong taste.

I wasn't sure who needed how much detail, and I think this is only about the second recipe I've ever written out. Feedback on how I wrote it would be appreciated -- that's something I'd like to get good at.

Version 0.1 was done in a six-quart crock-pot (the lid broke, which is why I'm using a smaller, borrowed crock-pot now) on a day when I suddenly got a craving for a potato soup with an opaque creamy broth (kind of like vichyssoise, but hot and without chicken broth in it). It cooked for several days as I kept adding different things (and sometimes running out to the grocery store for them), simultaneously trying to make it right and trying to decide what the target for "right" should be, (good thing I had a crock-pot, eh? Wonderful tools, they are) and somewhere along the way I got the idea to add squash. I'd eat a bowl, decide it needed something else, and use the space I'd just made in the pot to add more ingredients. In my dead-trees journal, at 21:05 on 2001-12-02, I wrote:

Baked a squash to add to the soup I'd been tweaking for the past several days -- a creamy potato improvisation. At this point I consider it finished -- and quite good. Someday I'll start remembering to write down what I do when I start something like that.

Of course there's no way I'm going to remember what-all I did for that, not when I was making small adjustments over the course of days, but I did make sure not to eat the last of the containers of it that I froze, so that I can at least take notes on the result at a later date, or compare it to a later version (such as the one I just made).

Version 0.2 was a matter of deciding that I wanted something like what I'd made a year ago (starting with the idea of squash rather than making that a last-stage inspiration), but didn't want to wait a couple of days for it to be ready. (And I figured I'd take into account what lessons I remembered having learned from the last one.) Between that and my general tendency to have disehs come out a little differently each time I make them, it's a somewhat different soup (though I'd have to thaw the archived copy to really be sure what the differences are at this point). After I've done this a few more times, I'll probably have a couple of different "I know how to make this so I'm making variations not experiments now" soups based on this general idea (probably one significantly sweeter and one more along thyme/oregano/cumin lines -- hey, I bet that's what acorn squash winds up being good for, and I could probably serve it in hollowed out acorn squash just like some pumpkin soups are served in pumpkins (that's not the vegetarian equivalent of cooking a calf in its mothers milk, is it?)!). I'll call those "1.0" versions of whatever they turn out to be. This recipe I've described here is still in the "I'm learning what this dish is / I'm figuring out how to make this / I'm deciding what this should be" stage.

Of course, as an improvisational cook, many of my dishes are one-shot "I think I'll make something like this ... how on Earth do I do that? Oh, gee, I did it but I'm not sure how" inventions like this, which only turn into "recipes" if I get a hankering for "something like that" often enough to fall into a pattern that I make variations of (like my omelete/frittata thingies), instead of re-inventing it each time. (I put "recipe" in quotes because I never get around to writing any of them down.)

I'd say that this was how I learned to cook in the first place, but I'm not sure I know how to cook; I just know that I can cook: I command ingredients to turn themselves into food, and somehow it just works. I wasn't taught, I wasn't conscious of the learning process, I can't teach it yet, it just works. And I find this odd and a little disturbing, to be honest. I am a teacher, and here is something that I do well and don't know how I do it. I moved out of my parents' house sometime in the late 1980s and I've been cooking for myself and lovers and occasionally others since then; I feel like I should have figured out how to analyze and teach it by now.

(Funny thing ... when I started cooking for myself, I could improvise but I was scared to try to cook anything from a recipe. Sound a little upside-down? Anyhow, once I gained enough self-confidence in the kitchen, I started occasionally using other folks' recipes. (I usually make small changes to them as I'm trying them (can't resist tinkering.)))

So if you ask me, "How did you know to do such-and-such?" don't count on getting a useful answer unless you can ask it in a new way that might open a door somewhere in my brain to let me peek at the process. (Or if you happen to ask one of the questions that I can answer with something like, "I wanted this effect and experience taught me that it happens when I do that" ... but that doesn't tell you how I knew I wanted "this effect" in the first place.) When I do figure out how the improvisation works, I'll write a book, or a web page, or something. Or at least I'll spend some time teaching the several people who've asked me over the years to teach them how to cook the way I do.

I really do want to write a "how I cook" book someday, but I guess that in the meantime I should at least write down recipes for more of the dishes that I have fallen into patterns for, so that folks who want to can make what I make even if I haven't figured out how to teach them how to make things up the way I do.

(I know there are other improvisionational cooks out there. Do any of you know enough about how you do it to be able to teach it?)

Writing this took longer than I expected. I'm on my third time through this CD (it seemed the right thing to listen to while typing this in, for some reason).