PJ Mullen, I’m Your Fall Flavors Fan
Holy Bisque, Kitchen-Man!
Roasted Butternut Squash and Apple Bisque, that is, as concocted and published by PJ Mullen, who says, and I completely agree, that “a dad’s place is in the kitchen.” I made a big bad batch of this soup today, and my taste-buds are singing!
Like Mullen, my dad did a lot of the home cooking while my mom toiled away at the office. Like Mullen, my dad loved to experiment in the kitchen and was always tweaking recipes, figuring out how to make them better. Unlike Mullen, my dad got stuck on the zucchini end of the squash spectrum, and spent way, way too much time figuring out different things to stuff into them. Unlike Mullen, my dad never got around to butternut squash.
Which is why, having bought several pounds of Maya’s butternut squash, I needed recipe ideas to use it up, and gratefully found myself ogling Mullen’s beautiful bisque. Thick, hearty, creamy, good for you and resonant with the flavors of fall. The longer I watched him make it, the more I had to make my own. And I have to say, after tasting the soup, the vanilla bean was truly a genius move.
Of course, like my dad would have, I tweaked Mullen’s recipe to what I had on hand. I was out of celery, so I threw in an extra apple. I let my onion really caramelize in the pan before adding the apple. Instead of using 6 cups of broth I used four. I replaced the remaining 2 cups of broth called for with the zest and juice of three oranges, because here in Phoenix, citrus is a Fall Flavor, too. I had no fresh ginger, so I tossed in a little ground ginger just before blending the soup. Being too lazy to go get celery, do you think I went and got mascarpone? If you guessed no, you are right. My finishing touch was a simple sprinkle of toasted walnuts on top.
But the soup is it’s-rainy-and-cold-out-and-I-want-something-warm-and comforting-inside-me heaven. We ate it for dinner, I’ve got two more servings in the fridge for later this week, and six more in the freezer for the next rainy day. And a new blog, peaches en risotto, to drool all over whenever I need food ideas.
December 17th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Thank you very much for the kind words. I’m glad you liked the recipe and like what you did with it to fit your tastes and what you had on hand. Thanks for posting about this, it always interests me to see how people adapt things.