Butternut Apple Curry Soup and a Farm Open House!

What a fabulous day Sunday was!  Our first ever Farm Tour and Open House, and Squash Sale!  Thank you so much to everyone who came out!  It was so nice to have CSA members and Farmers Market regulars out for a tour, answer questions, show them where all their food came from.  We had a beautiful day, perhaps a wee bit windier than we might have liked, but sunny and warm for October on the Prairies! The 'stars' of the afternoon were definitely the kittens in the barn, with the goats a close second!  The dogs were lapping up the attention and the chickens were... well, chickens: bobbing and weaving and staying out from under foot but hanging around to see if anybody had treats.

I must confess I didn't get a single picture of the day - just totally spaced out on that front (bad blogger, bad blogger).  I have asked a few guests if they have any to share and I'll get them up on the Aagaard Farms Facebook page.  But, we did get a few pictures as we were preparing the night before.  We served a butternut squash, apple, curry soup and roasted pieces of Kabocha and Butter cup squash.  The soup was quite a hit and here's the details for everybody that was asking!

The recipe for the soup came from the late Ken Kostick's book 'Ken's Soup Crazy' - an awesome book (which can be had for a very good price on Amazon Canada from some of the re-sellers right now)!   We've had this book for a long time, and have made this soup before.  Butternut squash is one of the most popular winter squashes, partly due to great flavor and texture but also because of it's small seed pocket and large serving of 'meat'.  We chose a big eight pounder - we wanted to make sure we had plenty and we'd happily freeze some leftover soup!  Farmer Man cut the butternut in half, tough even for him.  To get through a large squash or a thick-skinned one like Hubbard, we get the knife embedded and then tap it through the squash with a hammer.  Farmer Man actually reached for the rolling pin, but I made him put it back as I don't really want dents in my rolling pin, thank you very much!

Once cut, it's easy to remove the seed pocket and then Farmer Man peeled the squash.  This one was nice an ripe, so not much rind.  The butternut was then chopped in cubes.  Goodland apples from our young tree were next, much easier to peel and cut!  We're happy to say that a lot of the ingredients came from the farm: squash, apples, basil and onions were all ours.  Everything goes in a pot with the spices.  At this point we had a bit of an emergency: we realized we didn't have enough curry powder for the large batch we'd decided on.  We probably didn't have enough yogurt, either.  So, at 10:40 PM, Farmer Man went racing into town and got to the grocery store just before closing.  A little excitement for our Saturday night!  Unfortunately, when he got home and returned to his task, he realized we didn't have enough vegetable stock but it was too late to do anything about that.  He proceeded to make a large pot with what he had.  We did have the good fortune of good pal Deb offering to come help clean and prepare Sunday morning, so she was able to bring us the extra stock we needed early Sunday morning to get the second batch going.

Chopped squash, chopped apples, chopped onion, basil, cinnamon, curry, pepper, stock and apple juice are brought to a boil, then simmered fifteen minutes or until the squash softens up. Use a stick blender to puree in the pot, add yogurt and serve!  We were serving from a crock pot on low and found the soup separated a bit, so next time we wouldn't add the yogurt until transferring to the serving dish.  We've made this soup before with Hubbard Squash, equally good!

The recipe, straight from Ken Kostick's book:  2 cups chopped, peeled squash, 1 apple peeled, cored and chopped, 1 small onion chopped, 2 tbsp mild curry powder, 1/2 tsp dried basil, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, 6 cups low-fat vegetable stock, 1 cup apple juice, 1 cup non-fat yogurt (we used plain Greek yogurt).  We quadrupled this recipe, without any loss of flavor, the original recipe officially served eight.  According to the book, this is a low calorie soup with less than one gram of fat per serving.  And yummy - what more could you ask for!