Day 2. Or 7. Depending on How You Look At It.

The past two weeks have been defined for Joshua and I as The Time For Soup. As in, it has finally gotten consistently chilly here, and the market is overflowing with all sorts of root vegetables and meat and things that I want to throw into a soup pot and keep it on my stove all day making my apartment smell delicious.

We have made soup five (5! like the days I missed of NaBloPoMo! how ironic!) times recently, starting with winter squash soup which came from allrecipes, although now I can't find the exact one I used. It was a little blah, I can't lie. I know it involved butternut and acorn squash, along with sage, cumin, cayenne, and cinnamon. I really needed to ramp up the spiciness, but I was a little afraid of the flavor combination. One of my friends came over later that night and threw in a lot more of all the spices, then declared it amazing. So...I will need to rethink my hesitation there. Also, she is the last person I expected to dive into my fridge and eagerly pull out squash soup, so this has the potential to be a winner.

Soup #2 came Straight From The Farm, one of the many food blogs I read to a level of near-obsession. Roasted rosemary potato leek soup is as amazing as it sounds, although I am not a very careful measurer, and I overdid it on the rosemary a little. Next time I would add more leeks and tone down the rosemary to balance out the flavors. And if you are not really into soup, this can be just a great recipe for rosemary roasted potatoes.

Soup #3 was created out of a need to finish off a chicken that Joshua and I had picked up at the farmer's market and then roasted Ina Garten style (lemons stuffed in the cavity, over some yellow onions that just char as the chicken cooks...um, she is my hero. The recipe is from her book Barefoot in Paris, one of my favorites). I shredded the leftover lemon-y roasted chicken into our crockpot with chicken broth, chopped up onions, green beans, frozen corn, and peruvian blue potatoes. Comfort food. No recipe needed. (It was really good, but not that pretty. Especially don't make it with blue potatoes if you want to impress your friends)

Soup #4, a triumph, came from Deb at SmittenKitchen.If you are not reading her blog (daily) you should be. This sweet potato and sausage soup is one of the best things I have ever made, even though I substituted chicken chorizo for linguica (a Portuguese sausage I could not find, even at Whole Foods - although I'm sure they have it at Paulina Meat Market). If you are going to make this (and you should! immediately!), a spicier, fattier pork sausage will give your soup more flavor and heft than the chicken. I also substituted 5 color swiss chard for the spinach, and the pink veins against the bright greens and the orange of the sweet potatoes makes an absolutely gorgeous soup. I made this for Joshua and two of my friends and the overall consensus is that I will be making it again as soon as I can get my dry chapped hands on all the ingredients.

Soup #5 was really a white chicken chili that we threw together at home last night with our friend Jessica, who does not have a blog. (AND SHE NEEDS ONE. It can be about baking! getting married! so many things!) Jessica has been making white chicken chili for awhile now, and last year it even caused sort of a brawl when some of us (me!) did not really get as much as they wanted and others of us tried to take more than the allotted share. We made it last night on the stove, but I think it's even better in a crockpot when it can simmer all day. We loosely followed this recipe, and we added another can of beans and a can of diced tomatoes, along with leftover leeks I had sitting in the fridge. It was the perfect dinner to have on the first night that I really paid attention to the effects of daylight savings time, since it felt like we were eating at 9pm and really we had everything on the table at the ridiculously geriatric hour of 6pm. Sad!

I am looking for more good soup recipes so if you have any, please share! We will be returning to the previously mentioned topics of Christmas presents and compost shortly. (Like, after I have finished a very lengthy case study and care plan and learned how to administer blood products). Mmm...what a delightful way to end this post.