Superbowl Dessert Survey!

I'm headed to a Superbowl party and I told people I'd bring a dessert. I don't know what to bring. Please send suggestions.

Possibilities include:

• Killer Brownies
• Carrot cake brownies with buttercream icing
• Flourless Mocha Fudge Cake
• Pumpkin Mousse (or vanilla sweet potato mousse)
• Russian Cream and various toppings
• Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies

Other suggestions will also be considered. Leave comments!

Living Dangerously: Butternut Squash Soup with Roasted Garlic, Cinnamon, and Coriander

It's snowing here, finally. In fact, it has been snowing for the past few days. This is great news for me. My bedroom is in the very poorly insulated attic, and the snow helps keep the heat in. Cold weather is usually closely followed by soup, bread, or cookies. Tonight I made soup.

I've included the recipe, because I think it's pretty great stuff. But I feel that recipes are often lacking. They don't include any information about the thought process of the person who developed the recipe. There's no reasoning behind the ingredients or cooking times or anything else. I feel I would be remiss if I didn't include a full account of the development of this recipe. What follows is an exhaustive set of directions, should you feel that the recipe by itself is insufficient.

1. Go to a used book store. Browse the cooking section, and allow a garlic cookbook to catch your eye. Scan the book and immediately become suspicious when none of the recipes are more than 10 lines long.
2. Go back to the Garlic Roasted Butternut Squash and Pasta recipe. Decide that the recipe is boring, but the general garlic-and-squash concept has merit. Buy the book.
3. Arm yourself with the necessary ingredients.
   
4. Scoop out the icky bits of the squash. Chase the seeds around the kitchen floor. Briefly consider various uses for squash guts and despair when there's no one around to be victimized.
5. Cut up the rest of the squash and roast until fork tender. Throw in some unpeeled garlic cloves for good measure.
6. Unearth the blender.
   
7. As you wash years of greasy scuzz off the blender and your hands, mutter obscenities at whoever designed a kitchen without a ventilation system.
   
8. Peel the roasted squash. Start asking yourself if you really believe your mother when she told you that it's easier to peel a cooked squash than a raw one. Put the peeled squash in the blender.
   
9. Contemplate the fleeting nature of life and the inexorable march of entropy. Use your garlic cinders as a starting point. Extra credit: Recall bits and pieces of sophomore science class, specifically those bits concerning relative densities and heat transfer. Consider that maybe the fragile little garlics don't need to be roasted for quite as long as the squash slabs next time.
10. Set about salvaging the garlic. It turns out that there are squishy bits in the centers of the cloves. Painstakingly scrape out the soft stuff, and throw it in the blender with the squash.
    
11. Painstaking was never your style. Throw the last clove in whole, burnt bits and all. You've never minded burnt garlic before.
12. Add some olive oil, half and half, and chicken broth.
13. Blend.
14. Add more chicken broth.
15. Taste the soup.
16. Discover that burnt garlic is not nearly as palatable as you remember. Despair, and continue messing with the chicken broth to get the consistency right. Become somewhat optimistic. Everyone makes mistakes, and you were just about due for one. Decide that you'll do what you can for the soup, but if it doesn't work out, life will go on. Who's really going to care about one bad soup experience 5 years from now, anyway?
    
17. Recall the way that, 35 years after the fact, your parents still occasionally bring up "The Ketchup Incident." Plunge into a state of abject terror.
18. Rifle through your spice collection. Come up with cinnamon and coriander.
    
19. Pray.
20. Wait in quiet panic for your boyfriend to try the soup.
21. Celebrate a disaster narrowly averted.

The Recipe

• 2 butternut squashes, cleaned and cut into inch thick rings
• 5 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
• approximately 1/3 cup half and half
• approx 1/4 cup olive oil
• 14 oz low sodium chicken broth
• 1/2 stick Sri Lankan or Ceylon cinnamon (Do not use the standard American stuff. It's too strong. If you can't find Ceylon cinnamon, ask me or my mom. If you must use American, use extremely sparingly.)
• 1 tsp coriander

Roast the butternut squash until fork tender. Find someone else's directions on how to do this, because I'm bad at it. Same goes for the garlic. Roast it until... roasted. Peel the squash and garlic and put in a blender with about half of the half and half, the olive oil, and half of the chicken broth. Blend. Grind together the coriander and cinnamon, and add to the soup. Adjust half and half and chicken broth until desired consistency is achieved. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with croutons.

Party +1

This weekend marks the end of the first week of the school semester, and our house has a tradition of holding parties to celebrate. I'm just now waking up from last night's fete, and I feel that new ground has been forged.

This year, we decided for many reasons to stray from the typical food and (mostly) drink gathering. We added games. Lots of them. Board games, card games, video games, party games. We gamed for 8 hours. I went to bed at 5 am. And when I woke up this afternoon, I discovered something that my parents, former bridge club members, have probably figured out a long time ago. People playing games don't eat or drink all that much, and they don't make messes. We spent a grand total of 30 minutes cleaning up today, and that's without a dishwasher. And most importantly, I think people had more fun than normal. There will be more of these in the future.

More school

My posting got a bit sparse over the last month because of winter break. I'm back though, and I found a bunch of things that I meant to post about but never did.

No one really talks about the cultural value of Pittsburgh. Mostly, there just isn't much to talk about, especially if you don't care much for Andy Warhol. People generally don't travel from distant parts to visit the museums here. And I'm not suggesting you should. However, if you're already stuck here for some reason, you should really be getting your money's worth from the local cultural stuff. This goes double for all the CMU students, because most of the good stuff is within walking distance of campus and it's largely free (with your ID).

I'm only bringing this up at all because I found some old photos that I took at the local garden conservatory, back when they had their mythological creatures exhibit. The one you're looking at now is a hydra. They also had a two headed dragon, Argus (with all the eyes), Cerberus, and a few others. The exhibit has changed now, but it was great fun while it lasted. They don't have anything up now, but in May, they're doing a Dale Chihuly exhibit.