butternut squash

So my kitchen pretty much rocks today.

It's soup day here (because it is also grocery day, and soup is easy to whip up after groceries). Last night, after my failed macaroni and cheese, I did all the prep work for my soup. I stood in the kitchen, trying to peer over the stairs into the living room and watch Two Broke Girls at the same time, and chopped my way through a medium butternut squash, fresh from a friend's garden. Then I worked my way through a handful of carrots and celery and the dreaded onion. Put them in some tupperwares, back in the fridge, and I have all my prep for the day done. I love it.

Today, coming home from the grocery store, I simply popped a tray of squash in the oven until it started to smell gorgeous, put a squirt of olive oil in the bottom of my dutch oven and began caramelizing some onions. Then in go the carrots & celery, until things start to smell good (I told you, no recipes, just what feels right!) and I popped the squash from the cookie sheet into the dutch oven, covered with broth and let it simmer until I decided it was done.

That was supposed to be it, really. Nothing fancy, just soup.

But then there were these beautiful mushrooms at Freshco. And I had a pepper that really needed using in the fridge, and lord do I love me some stuffed mushrooms. (They were glorious. Stuffed mushrooms is one of my top "impressing people" recipes, but they're just as easy to do for no reason.) At the point that the mushrooms were in the oven, I probably should have stopped.

You can't have soup without bread, though. And as a general rule, the only bread Bunny and I keep in the house is bagels. (He likes them in the morning, and I am anti-sandwich as a general rule, although I have had some fantastic ones, so we don't keep bread. I keep us in leftover lunches all week.) Bagels should not be dipped in ridiculously good butternut squash soup. They just shouldn't.

So I made tarragon-garlic biscuits, as a variation of the good old Red Lobster Cheddar Bay biscuits. Because I hadn't already done enough.

They were delicious.