Biscuits and Butternut Squash

On Friday, five girls and myself cooked up some delicious food. First we made our stock. Ingrid, Mariah and I, were the "stock" team. We browned the carrots, celery and onion, added salt, water, parsley, thyme, and sage. Once all that was in the pot we let it simmer for a while.

Lily, Elisa, and Katherine worked on prepping the vegetables for the soup. They chopped herbs and scooped out the roasted butternut squash.
Lily cut up the onions using the super pro cutting technique (the pungent onions still caused some tears to be shed).

The next step was to fry the sage leaves for a garnish. We heated up our olive oil and dropped the fresh sage leaves. After one minute they were nice and crispy, so we lifted them from the pan and put them on paper towels to cool.
We all tasted one of the fried leaves, it had a very robust and rather nutty flavor.

Time to cook the onions and herbs for the soup. Mariah stirred up the onions until they began to brown and then we added in the roasted squash, garlic, stock and salt. While this was simmering it was on to the biscuits.

As we were getting out the ingredients for the biscuits I realized we had about 1 tsp. of baking powder but we actually needed 4 teaspoons. Shoot! That is why before making a recipe you should double check you have all the ingredients. Seems pretty logical, but, unfortunately I forgot this step for baking powder.

Luckily, I live not three minutes (walking time) from Safeway. So, Elisa, Lily, Mariah, and Katherine went on a mission for baking powder. Armed with $10, cell phones, and a piece of paper that said "BAKING POWDER". It took them roughly fifteen minutes to bring back a shiny new tin of baking powder.

We made two batches of buttermilk biscuits. One group had a bit of a flour mix up, not putting enough, ending up with very wet dough, and then realizing where they went wrong, and fixing it.
Which was great that they realized what happened. We lacked a biscuit cutter so turned over cups sufficed.

In went two sheets of round doughy mounds and fifteen minutes later out came some delicious looking golden biscuits. We pureed the soup and now it was time for everyone to enjoy the meal they had just cooked!

Everyone took a bowl of the soup and garnished it with the fried sage leaves and cubes of gruyere cheese. With that, we sat down to the table to eat the wonderful meal we'd just made. Everyone seemed to think both the biscuits and the soup were delicious. And, I'm pretty sure it was Mariah's first time eating butternut squash!

Thanks to all the girls who came. You were very enthusiastic and had a lot of energy. I can't wait for next time! If there are any suggestions for what we should make in the future, let me know!

By the way, although it may appear that I used my tongue to write the "cooking club" in the flour... The girls made that with their fingers. No tongues touched the counter, I promise!

January 30th Meeting Plan

For the last couple of days I've been trying to figure out what we should make at the first meeting. The perfect idea has been eluding me. Well today it came to me, why not do soup! It's ideal for the drizzly and gray days we've been having.

So here's the plan:
We're going to be preparing a delicious vegetable soup. We'll learn about making stock from scratch. In addition to soup, we'll be making fluffy buttermilk biscuits. Come prepared to cook up some yummy food, have fun, be adventurous and maybe even learn a thing or two!

The Menu:
Winter Squash Soup with Fried Sage Leaves
Ingredients:
winter squash
olive oil
garlic
sage
onions
thyme
parsley
stock
salt and pepper

Basic Buttermilk Biscuits
Ingredients:
flour
baking powder
butter
buttermilk
salt

Both recipes are from Deborah Madison's "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" (One of my absolute favorite cookbooks)

Butternut Squash Pizza

I think pizza is one of my all time favorite foods to make. It's delicious and you can throw all sorts of things on it. The other night I made a pizza with Butternut squash from our farm box. I made the pizza "Cheeseboard style". So there was no sauce, just mozarella cheese and onions on the bottom, then pre-cooked butternut squash, some olives a friend of my mom's picked and cured, more mozarella, some feta cheese and fresh sage. When it came out of the oven I brushed the crust with olive oil (with crushed garlic in it). It was definitely a winter pizza, with no tomatoes or basil anywhere near.

Number One

As you can see I am just getting this blog going. It will document the adventures of "Slow Food Junior", a food and cooking club for preteens and young teens. I've been wanting to do start this club for a while and I'm really excited! There will be more posts in the days to come.