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...