Maria and Garlic.

Maria is one of the first of my friends to get her own house. So she made this dish in a kitchen that she owns. Inferiority complexes aside (it's a bad market anyway, right?), I admit a bit of mouth watering over the dish. It's chicken and veggies in a garlic marinade. Surprised? Anyone who knows Maria understands her love (obsession) with garlic. She puts it in everything. It was sort of a joke back at the house on Florence and Jefferson in Kirksville. She even got one of this metal "bar of soap" thingy that washes off weird odors (like garlic and fish).

My other comment about this to note how healthy my friends/two-of-five faithful readers (doesn't anyone make cookies?). Also how much they seem to like alcohol (note the bottle of beer).

Again, send me some lovely, mouth-watering photos of your food, and I'll do a nice, complimentary post about you (even you, dad, gravy, gravy, gravy). lrseyler at hotmail dot com. Thanks.

Jenny's Tilapia.

Jenny (photographic genious) sent me this in an email--not the food (unfortunately) just the photo. Tilapia with baked veggies. I have noticed the green beans are really delish this year (maybe they are every year and I just don't notice), plus mushrooms, hello, haven't I already posted at least once about my obsession with the fungi? My only question was if she drank that entire bottle of gewurtz in the background. She definitely should have invited me over to help out (too bad she lives in St. Louis). Send me photos and/or recipes of your food and I will totally post it--that way I won't have to cook as much, and you'll get the spotlight (we all win!). Send to lrseyler at hotmail dot com.

Soups On.

Fall is just about here. It is my favorite season, even though I get horrible hayfever. I just love putting on sweatshirts, being comfortable in jeans again, sleeping under the covers and the smell of people turning on their furnaces. I also love soup. You can't eat soup in the summer, too hot. But fall, mmm. Butternut squash soup would have be the quintessential fall soup, you know, pumpkins, harvest, halloween.

I have indeed eaten pumpkin soup before, but I have never made it. And my experience with the vegetable is pretty limited to experiments this week and a butternut squash and risotto dish I made a couple years ago. I adapted this recipe from this amazing food blog and a Gourmet magazine recipe. (The Gourmet recipe called for either Turkish or Californian bay leaves. What? Who are these people.)

There's something intensely gratifying about chopping vegetables into tiny pieces. I do not feel the same about chopping acorn squash. The skin is thick. It would have been easier to open it with a hammer. And I did have to roast the squash for a while to soften it. I don't think I would have had the same problems using butternut squash, but seriously, I'm lucking I didn't cut my fingers off.

Also, and this is important. My mom is looking for a good soup cookbook. Leave recommendations in the comments section thanks.

Butternut (Acorn) Squash Soup:

2 small potatoes chopped

1 celery stalk chopped 1 carrot chopped

2 pounds butternut squash chopped

3 cremini mushrooms diced and sauteed

1/2 medium onion chopped

2 tablespoons olive oil

4 cups chicken stock

Sautee onions with salt and pepper in olive oil until tender in large pot. Add potatoes, celery, carrot, squash and stock and bring to a boil. Simmer for 20 minutes or until vegetables are tender. Turn heat off and let sit for 10 minutes. Transfer soup to food processor and puree, bit by bit if necessary. Add sauteed mushrooms and serve. Salt and pepper to taste.

Emptying the Fridge.

As I'm going out of town this weekend and am off to Costa Rica (!!) for a week following that, the inspiration for this meal was unloading my refrigerator. Edible contents of the fridge/pantry used in this meal: roma tomato, heirloom tomato, green pepper, canned artichoke hearts, baby bella mushrooms, onion and garlic. I added orzo and some extremely old and already opened marsala cooking wine (gets better with time right?). I didn't have cream so ingeniously made some buttermilk to thicken. Topped with parmasan cheese and basil and parsley. It actually turned out shockingly better than I thought it would. And maybe not so shockingly, I ate all of the vegetables pictured above. In cleaning out the fridge, I ended up throwing away too much old food (kids may not be starving in China anymore but somewhere in Africa they are). One peach in particular looked more like a mushroom than anything else. It is hard cooking for just one person. Sure, no one else would let me get away with what I made tonight. But leftovers every night for a week gets old (figuratively and literally). Anybody got tips for reinventing leftovers?