delicata or della cotta, it's good squash

This post is not about the soup that I made last night. Not that it was a bad soup. Missy even ate the beet greens that were in it after only a few moments of hesitant prodding with her spoon. It’s not about the soup because I made the soup in a hurry. I was sick. I’d spent the weekend blowing my nose a lot and talking in the way that people do when their heads are great sacks of mucous. I felt ready for work on Monday, rode in, and suffered some embarrassment when a co-worker caught me staring blankly at my personal email for, like, seven or eight minutes. Having thus obtained independent verification that I was not in a productive state, I packed it in and went home early.

I had been planning to make stuffed peppers. I don’t like stuffed peppers. But, as part of my campaign to like the things I get from my CSA, I was determined to take the half-dozen green peppers I picked up on Saturday and make the most of them, not half a pepper at a time in pasta sauce this time, but all at once. I went by Fairway, and picked up 2 lbs. of sweet Italian sausages at $3/lb. My plan was to layer this in the peppers with polenta (made from the fancy-pants cornmeal I bought the weekend before) and cheese (most likely a reliable New York State cheddar I’ve been buying for about $5/lb.). Standing dizzily in the paper towel aisle, with Bounties and Brawnys swimming around me, I realized that this was not to be a stuffed peppers night. This was to be a night for something simpler.

Last week, I met with a guy I’m working with on a corporate video project, to pick up some tapes that I had to capture (capture is video-speak for put-into-the-computer). He also gave me a couple of packets of soup, explaining that he and his wife bought them, and, both being vegetarian, resolved to give them away when they realized that the soup packets contained chicken bouillon. These were free food — and not just free food, but free fancy-pants food. These were those Alessi soup packets, in the faux-brown-paper foil packets, that have cropped up in upscale grocery stores over the last few years. I’d never bought them, assuming that they were a bit expensive for what they were. I was happy to take them off my colleague’s hands. And when I got home, head spinning with my cold, I figured: soup. (I was down to one-word figurations.)

I can’t so much as open a can of Progresso without having to doctor it up a bit. So, I diced up half an onion, a little garlic, and a hot pepper, and sauteed them in a little olive oil. I broke half a pound of the sausage meat free from its casing, and sauteed it with the onions and all until it began to brown. After that, I followed the directions, adding a certain quantity of water to the pan, bringing it to a boil; adding the soup mix; returning to the boil, and simmering for twelve minutes.

It did not smell especially good. It did not taste especially good, either. It had that powdered chicken fat, dried celery, and MSG smell that, to me, characterizes cheap soup foundations. Which this was. (”Alessi,” I later learned, is a tradename of Vigo, makers of the cheap rice-and-beans mix that I stockpiled in college.) It was also, for a supposed Tuscan white-bean soup, insipidly thin. I added another pepper. I added minced parsley. Not enough. I added a cup of homemade chicken stock, a can of beans — habichuelas pintadas — and a cup of shredded beet greens. Goya, the CSA, and the last remains of my $13 chicken to the rescue. The beet greens turned the soup a funny pinkish color of which I wasn’t a huge fan, but it was good enough to eat for dinner, and breakfast and lunch following.

At this point, you might ask, if I went to all that trouble to mask the soup base, why not simply start from scratch?

Why not, indeed?

I didn’t take any pictures. Instead, I offer the above portrait of the pasta I made on Sunday night, with a red sauce incorporating onion, garlic, one of the delicata/della cotta squash from this weekend’s CSA haul, and another cup of chicken stock. The squash cooked down to a pleasantly, slightly-stringy consistency, and spread itself throughout, lightening the tomato as it went. The sauce contained more or less the same set of ingredients — minus the sausage and the Alessi soup mix — as the soup I made the next night. The results were wholly more satisfactory. I also toasted up the seeds, salted them, and ate them as a snack.

whole-wheat penne with a tomato-squash sauce