Month: November 2007

I didn’t actually intend to make pasta dumplings. And frankly, I think this would have been better if the pasta had turned out the way I wanted it to, so I think this recipe needs a little more tweaking. I actually based this soup off a recipe that has been sitting in my overstuffed recipe folder for almost three years: Mark Bittman’s Pasta in Broth recipe from his New York Times column, The Minimalist. His recipe is minimal, all right, and I am decidedly not a minimalist. So I decided to fancy it up just a little.

What intrigued me about the original recipe is that it seemed like a really easy way to have homemade pasta. No pasta maker necessary, no endless rolling out of dough. Bittman writes that you can just pinch small pieces of dough off the ball and throw them into simmering stock. What could be easier? Sadly, it wasn’t as easy as I thought to pinch small pieces. Mine were larger, and resulted not in pasta so much as in doughy, heavy dumplings. It’s not that they were bad, just…unusual.

Continue reading Tomato and Mushroom Soup with Pasta Dumplings

This is clearly the season for soup, and thanks to my lovely mother, there will be a lot of it this week. After last week’s not so smooth (yet still delicious) black bean and butternut squash soup, she went and sent me an immersion blender. Isn’t she awesome? In order to ensure that it gets a lot of use, I’ve already planned to make three, yes, three soups this week. And no, that is not a giant bowl of mustard you see above, that is a very simple, yet very delicious buttercup Hubbard squash soup.

I wasn’t planning on squash soup, since it just seemed a little repetitive, but when I saw Hubbard squash at the Roche on Sunday I had to buy it. Oddly, they called it buttercup squash, but as it turns out it was a Hubbard. Or rather, a piece of a Hubbard. A small piece. A piece so small that, much to my surprise, it made a single bowl of soup. Now that is cooking for one.

Continue reading Impromptu Buttercup, I mean, Hubbard Squash Soup