Soup, week eight and nine: GF corn chowder and butternut squash, carrot and ginger.

I was out of town last weekend, so yesterday we made two soups to make up for it.  Both recipes were found that morning in about 5 minutes, as opposed to my usual hours of scouring the interwebs for THE PERFECT SOUP.  I think I've finally realized that life is too short for that nonsense.

Soup #8 was based off a question posed to him - "what's one ingredient and/or one type of soup you'd like to try?"  The answer was "chowder", and the caveat was that he'd tried to find a good chowder recipe last weekend but they all contained potato.  So this roasted corn chowder with lime, for which we could easily substitute butternut squash in place of sweet potato, seemed to fit the bill quite nicely. 

I must confess that the note at the end of the recipe about using a crock pot for this soup could have been the driver.  There has been a crock pot in my kitchen since cohabitation over a year ago and I've never used it.  And that just seemed WRONG.

making it right

The photo above was taken before we added the tofu and coconut milk.  It was a squeeze, but it all fit.  Barely.  We tasted it last night but didn't actually enjoy a bowl until this afternoon.  It was lovely - not very creamy, very hearty, very spicy.  And pretty healthy.

Soup #9 was a play off Soup #8 - since we'd have to substitute a little bit of butternut squash for sweet potatoes in that soup, why not just try a nice butternut squash (, carrot, ginger) soup as well, to use up the rest of the butternut squash?  They really had me at the name of the blog - um, "with style and grace"?  Yeah, I am so there.  The soup was delicious.

with style, grace and quinoa corn muffins

Yes, it's been almost 2 weeks since my last quinoa corn muffin, and that also seemed WRONG. We were out of yellow cornmeal so I substituted blue corn meal. I usually find this to be grittier, but in this recipe it somehow worked out. I'm totally sure the lime butter had nothing to do with that.

and so pretty!

I'll almost be sad to see this quarter end.

I won't miss all the dishes though.