Shoulda Coulda Woulda

The other week I made this delicious butternut squash soup.  It was a basic recipe with a few tweaks, and the result was the kind of thing where when you taste it you say "I didn't mean for it to taste this good, but I'm not complaining!"  And for a day or so after that, if I had been organized enough I could have written down the details of what I did.  But I put it off and now the soup is gone, as is the memory of what exactly was involved.

I'm going to try and list what I put in it, and maybe one day I'll follow this recipe and see if I can adjust it to recreate that soup.  If not, it will have to be one of those things that existed once, and all you can do is be happy that it did.    

2 small butternut squash, cut in half
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, chopped1 stalk of celery
1 carrot
3-4 sage leaves, chopped
salt
pepper
dash cayenne
few dashes ground ginger

Roast the squashes.  Cook the onion, celery, carrot, and garlic in about 2 tbsp of olive oil until soft.  Peel and cut up the squash and add it to the pan with the sage.  Saute another minute or so.  Season with salt and pepper.  Add about 3 cups of water and let come to a boil, then simmer for about 5 minutes.  Turn off heat and let cool a little, then transfer in batches to a food processor and puree (or use one of those nifty stick blender things).  Transfer back into the pot, and add cayenne and ginger to taste.  Add more salt and pepper if needed, and more water if you want it thinner.

That might actually be pretty close.  The exercise of writing out a memory makes it easier to recall.  Although, I may just be re-writing the memory... the more you recall something, the more your memory deviates from the actual event, since you reform the neuron pathways each time you think about it.  Or, so RadioLab says.  Either way, let this be a reminder to me that procrastination only infrequently leads to a superior situation, and most of the time you're left thinking shoulda, coulda, woulda...   

Finally

I knew it had to happen eventually. Today begins my emergence from the comfort of food blog viewership to the big wide world of food blog ownership. Or at least beginnership.

I am quite limited in resources at the moment. Not only do I depend on a six-year old point-and-shoot camera, the memory card for said camera is somewhere in my house in Maryland, and the connector cord is no where to be seen (and has been in that unfortunate condition for years). I have no h key on my computer, and so must 'copy' an h to my clipboard and use ctrl+v to complete almost any sentence in the English language. And I'll be living on an Americorps stipend, slowly building up my ingredient stores when I feel I can afford it, hoping to make bloggable food from a poor student pocketbook.

However, what I do have (if you're keeping score) is a punderful blog title, a love of food and the process of creating it, and not much to loose. So far, so good, if you ask me.


You may wondering what motivated me to finally get off the bench and into the game. It has been in the back of my mind throughout my perusing of the many beautiful food blogs that grace the web. Recently I had been considering it more seriously, since I knew I was about to start this Americorps position as the Healthy Lifestyles Associate for the Cornell Cooperative Extension and thought a blog would be a valuable tool to record my experience. But the tipping point came in my investigation into homemade tempeh. The logical conclusion for you to draw would be that I had an interesting experience in tempeh-making. I don't want to get your hopes up, though that is a possibility for the future. The truth is much less exciting: what I'm really after is free starter. On this website, they offer to send you a free sample of tempeh if you pay shipping. But if you link your blog to their website, they send it 100%, for real for real (not for play play), genuinely free.

Mission accomplished.


I promise, though, I will repay that waived shipping fee in contributions to the world of food blogs. Who knows, perhaps when I eventually write about tempeh making someone will feel inspired to make a little tempeh of their own, and it will be mission accomplished for www.tempeh.info too. And who knows, perhaps I will actually invest in a good camera to document my experiences in food and health. After all, a blog without pictures is like a meeting without snacks. You may have learned something, but did you have any fun?