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.