I’ve been getting a couple of huge butternut squashes each week in my produce box, but I prefer to use kabochas for roasting, which is my default squash-prep method. So what’s a girl to do with all the butternut piling up?

Make soup:

Roasted butternut squash-harissa soup with thyme-almond pesto

This first soup, from a couple of weeks ago, had a healthy dose of harissa (a dried pepper and spice paste) added just at the end of sauteeing some onions, and a bit of lemon juice to finish it before serving. The thyme pesto also had some arugula because a pesto made with just almonds and thyme would be too intense for me. I sprinkled on toasted almonds for a touch of crunch.

And then you make more soup, to keep the pile of squash in the corner of the counter from tipping over:

Butternut squash and casabel chile soup with sunflower seeds, grated romano cheese and whipped avocado

The second soup followed the same formula, but with dried casabel chiles, fire roasted tomatoes, toasted cumin and a little masa harina as seasoning. The crunchy bits there were sunflower seeds roasted with some honey, cumin and soy sauce. The avocado plopped on top to be stirred in for a creamy cool accent, was whipped together with tomatillo salsa for acidity and extra flavor.

Butternut is great for soup; it has a nice deep flavor and blends up perfectly smoothly with no little stringy bits (I prefer kabocha for roasting because it’s just so smooth and dense and holds together nicely.)

We got another squash yesterday in the produce box, but I think the season is over very very soon, and that makes me a little sad, and also relieved.

Nutella-yogurt mousse with brownie chunks, raspberries and toasted hazelnuts

I just took fat free, plain, Greek yogurt (really any fat level Greek yogurt would work; the fatty ones would probably be that much tastier) and mixed it with a few tablespoons of Nutella, 1-2 tablespoons of Nutella per cup, depending on how chocolatey you want it. The batch pictured had some chopped up brownies I had leftover, raspberries and toasted hazelnuts, all layered like a trifle.

I’ve been making this sort of thing at work once a month or so, when I want to have a dessert, but don’t have a lot of extra time to bake something from scratch, or when I have leftover cake or cookies to use up (this is rare!)

If you like nutella, you’ll like this. The tangy Greek yogurt (which is pretty much just strained plain yogurt) goes perfectly with the Nutella.

Someone at work suggested mixing in dulce de leche (a sort of latin american caramel sauce) instead of Nutella, which sounds great. I also want to try making some homemade Nutella. And another batch of Greek yogurt ice cream. And coat it with some Nutella-coconut oil magic shell (a random idea which just struck me now; it seems like it would work.) I hope SmugMug HQ is up for testing all that goodness.

Hummus is so so tasty (especially mine, if I do say so myself. I use little if any oil, but plenty of tahini and lots of processing time, which makes for a very smooth and rich tasting hummus.) It’s not especially pretty, though. Think of it like a canvas of tan waiting for decoration:

Hummus with zatar, tahini and roasted chickpeas on top

It’s especially nice if your decorations are also delicious. The purply stuff on the hummus is zatar, an herb and sesame seed blend. Mine contains sumac (dried berries of an edible kind of sumac; the sumac we had in Minnesota when I was a kid caused rashes if you even touched it, so I wouldn’t want that on my hummus.) Sumac adds a nice lemony taste to things. I especially love it on pink lentil soup.

Pea shoots are a fun ingredient that I can get year round at our Whole Foods, in huge bags, I think maybe people use them for juicing. But I like to use them in salads:

Spinach and pea shoots with roasted mushrooms, radishes and mustard dressing

They taste just like snap peas!

This green bean salad made me like green beans, which I usually find sort of unpleasantly textured. The key is barely cooking them at all, then making a nice sharp dressing and eating them cold, I love them like that:

Green beans, peas and snap peas with lemon-mustard seed dressing

This soup has a TON of garlic in it, but it’s cooked slowly for a nice long time so that it’s mellow and rich:

Garlic-saffron soup with harissa, greek yogurt and beans

The saffron adds a nice bite, and the beans add something filing and meaty.

My jasmine vines are blooming, rhubarb is in the grocery stores and I saw daffodils blooming on the way to work Friday. Spring is here! Enjoy it with some fresh produce, let any cuisine influence you and play with your vegetables.

Corn smut on my cutting board

If you ever get the chance, do eat it, because it’s delicious. It’s called huitlacoche or corn smut, and is in season with corn (ie not now).

I got my hands on a whole bunch of infected corn cobs last summer:

Corn smut on the cob

I used them to make a filling for plantain-dough empanadas. I told the lunch-eaters at SmugMug HQ that they had ‘corn mushrooms’ in them, and people loved them. It has a sort of delicate mushroom taste, earthy and rich, and went very well with roasted corn and beans. A mole poblano as a dipping/drizzling sauce made boss-man Don happy. Hopefully this summer I can get some again.

It’s been super busy around the SmugMug offices. We’ve been hiring like crazy and are now up to around 30 mouths to feed at Headquarters. Very exciting how fast we’re growing, but also a lot of work, especially since our kitchen is not meant to cook for that many. But we’re expanding our kitchen (more on that another day), and my assistant is coming in at 10:30 instead of 11:30, so things are feeling a little more under control again.

Anyway, on to pretty pictures of what we’re eating:

Raspberry hazelnut bars

They sometimes have these great raspberry linzer bars at whole foods, but they’re pretty sweet and greasy and I thought I could do better. After hunting around for a recipe, I decided to try the one for raspberry bars I found in my online Cooks Illustrated subscription. I don’t want to post it because they’re…. touchy about that, but I’ll link to someone else who did.

They were exactly what I was hoping for, and I have a few jars of raspberry jam waiting to make these again for the lucky mouths at SmugMug. Again, we’re hiring so come work for us and eat my cooking every day!

This salad was inspired by a recent festival and a session where we tasted a bunch of very sea-peaty whiskeys:

Barley and smoked tofu salad with whisky dressing and seaweed

I have usually had whiskey in sweet foods, but it was perfect in the dressing for this salad. It brought together all the smokey salty flavors of the various foods and a hint of sweet caramelyness.

Chocolate pie with maple-glazed sliced almonds and raspberry sauce. 100% Vegan.

The filling is awesome and so simple. I think of it as an old school-hippie dessert, and have been making it since I discovered tofu. You can use it for a pudding with fruit, pie filling like here, or even frosting. Or on a spoon out of the blender.

For this pie, I melted a 6 oz bag of dark chocolate chips (high quality, vegan ones) and blended it up with two packs of mori-nu silken tofu. And a touch of vanilla. That’s it.

The nut is a basic nut crust, usually hazelnut or almond since I can get those pre-ground. I pre-bake it in the spring-form pan before adding the tofu mix and chilling. Almonds boiled with maple syrup until pretty dry in the pan and boiled, reduced, strained frozen raspberries are the simple garnishes.

Try blending up some silken tofu with chocolate. You won’t be sorry. If you’re feeling really hippie, you can do avocado and chocolate.

Since I enjoy the concept of lettuce wraps so much, I decided to make some kung pau tofu and wrap it up in lettuce for a fancier work version:

Kung pao tofu lettuce wraps

The soft lettuce, crunchy nuts, sweet-salty complex sauce, chewy tofu. Wow. I could eat them every day.

Try wrapping asiany leftovers in lettuce leaves, you won’t be sorry.

I just celebrated my birthday, and Thanksgiving is coming up in a couple of days. I’m feeling grateful. I get to cook stuff like this every day:

Portabello mushroom caps waiting to be roasted and filled with barley-artichoke heart stuffing

The same day we also had:

Truffled beets with watercress salad and walnut pate toasts

And this too:

Warm celery root and puy lentil salad with mint and hazelnuts next to cool avocado-dill-cucumber-watermelon radish salad

And a little of this:

Warm fava-herb dip with pine nuts

We also had some meat and stuff, but I especially love cooking veggies (since that’s what I eat.)

Thanks for being so awesome, SmugMug. Another happy year has passed. Being 33 is fantastic so far. (Wait until I post about my birthday cakes. I don’t know which was better, the banana with chocolate frosting or the pumpkin with maple cream cheese frosting.)

I have a couple of pink spots on my hands three weeks later from an attack by the polenta I served this dish over:

Kabocha squash, Jacob's cattle beans and kale in chocolate tomato sauce over polenta

I see why old Italian ladies use deep pots with long wooden spoons to make polenta. One would think I would learn, as this is the worst, but not the first polenta burn.

This recipe got me started on liking mole and chocolate in savory foods. It comes from a cookbook by the chef at a restaurant in Cork, Ireland, which we were supposed to go to this past April (we didn’t get to go to Ireland at all because of the STUPID ICELANDIC VOLCANO! but that’s another story)

His beautiful cookbook, Wild garlic, gooseberries and me is so delightful to read. It’s made up of sections of essays separated by sections of recipes. I feel like I’m tramping through the Irish countryside in rubber boots picking stinging nettles and other tasty goods, breathing the wet, green air. Mmmm Ireland.

If you want to make it, Heidi at 101 Cookbooks made it a while back and posted the recipe. And you really should. A simple list of ingredients but really complex flavor. I mess around with the recipe in other ways too, but I almost always do the lower end of the jalapenos and add in a smoked one – a chipotle soaked and chopped up. I’m a sucker for that smokey flavor.