I spent all day Sunday making soup. Partly because I was just in the mood to make soup and partly because, well, I do have a lot of vegetables around the house. I made celeriac potato soup, pumpkin soup, and roasted beet soup.

I started the day off with the celeriac potato soup. One book had suggested that celeriac should be peeled with a pairing knife, but I peeled the celeriac with my favorite vegetable peeler and that worked quite well for me. The potatoes I had were on the small side, which made for a lot of peeling. I lightly sauteed a diced onion for a few minutes, then added the celeriac and sauteed for a few minutes more. Then I added the potato chunks, about 6 cups of water and seasoned with salt and pepper. When the potatoes and celeriac were tender, I blended everything together with my trusty stick blender.

Since my large Le Creuset was busy with the celeriac potato soup, I decided to make the pumpkin soup in the pressure cooker. First step – peeling the pumpkins.

Once the pumpkins were peeled and gutted, I cut the pumpkin up into 3/4 inch cubes and roughly diced an onion. I sauteed the onion in the pressure cooker and added the pumpkin after a few minutes. I added water until the 2/3 mark in my cooker and closed the lid. I brought it up to high pressure and cooked for about 10 minutes, followed by a natural pressure release. Once the mix had cooled, I blended it up with the stick blender and seasoned with salt and pepper. This time I left out the dairy because I was planning to freeze the soup.

The last soup I made was the roasted beet soup, adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. While it was the last soup to hit the stove, it was actually started first because the first thing I did in the morning was peel the beets (messy, but fun) and roast them with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. Once the beets were roasted, they hung out on the counter until I was ready to make the soup.

If memory serves me, the soup started with sauteed onions as most good soups do. In the meantime, I was busy as a bee chopping up the roasted beets in to small pieces. I added the chopped beets to the pan after cooking the onions for about 15 minutes and then followed with water. The directions had the soup cooking for a half an hour or so, but I found that it took much longer to get it to a consistency that I liked.

At the end of the day I packed all of the soup into plastic containers for the freezer. The freezer is full. It does not want me to put any more soup in it. I will probably keep trying my hand at freezer tetris. Courtney thinks I need to re-brand my freezer to give it a more enticing name, so I think I will call it ‘A Showcase of Seasonal Delights’.

It’s hard to believe that the season is almost over. This season I knew better what to expect and how to plan things out and manage the sheer quantity of fruit and vegetables coming in each week, and it feels like it went much quicker than last year. Maybe some of that is tied to the fact that it’s just getting cold now and I can’t quite believe that Thanksgiving is just two weeks away. I didn’t take a picture of the share last night because we had a Fancy Party to get to and I only had enough time to stash the greens in the fridge before I needed to get dolled up. Here’s the list:

Red Beets-2 pounds
Rutabaga-1
Potatoes-2 pounds
Butternut Winter Squash-1
Shallots-2
Red Russian Kale-1 bunch
Purple Top Turnips-2 pounds
Sage-1 bunch
Collards- 1 bunch
Carrots-1 pound
Fruit Share – Jonagold, Cameo and Mutsu Apples

I’m working from home so I did a bit of cooking over my lunch time. I made pressure cooker poached pears, which I put in the freezer, and then applesauce in the pressure cooker. The house smells delicious.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been on the go a lot lately. I got back from San Francisco last Wednesday in plenty of time to pick up the share, but I was way too exhausted to do anything other than take pictures and put the vegetables away. Plus, it was Halloween and I needed to hand out candy far more than I needed to cook. Thursday evening I made a delicious pumpkin soup out of the pie pumpkins I’ve had sitting around for a few weeks. It’s definitely a make again soup. For Friday night dinner I made my spinach vegetable kugel but used collards and kale instead of spinach, which worked out quite well. Tonight I’m planning to make a big “everything” vegetable soup to try and use up whatever is left in the fridge before the new stuff comes tomorrow. We still have a lot of fruit too, so I might need to make another batch of pressure cooker pears (they come out like poached pears but it’s super quick to do) and maybe some applesauce too. If only I actually had room in the freezer.

Week 20

Potatoes-2 pounds
Onions-4
Beets-2 pounds
Delicata-2
Turnips with Greens-1
Collards-1 bunch
Parsley-1 bunch
Black Radish-1
Romanesco-1

Mutsu-green apple, multi purpose
Bosc Pears-rusty brown pear, multi purpose
Empire Apples-small, red really crispy-good eating
Jona Gold Apples-large, red and gold tinge-good cooking

Week 21

Garlic-2
Winterbor Kale-1 bunch
Carrots-2 pounds
Green Winter Cabbage-1 head
Red Ace Beets-2 pounds
Carnival Winter Squash-1
Mint-1 bunch
Celariac-2 bulbs
Graffiti Cauliflower-1

APPLES: Jona Gold, Fuji, Golden Delicious; Bosc Pears