Winter squash soup

We made our first winter squash soup of the year with the Sibley Squash that I picked up at the Hillsdale Farmer’s Market this morning .  Our main purpose of going to the Hillsdale Farmer’s Market was to procure some Ayers Creek Farm heirloom beans but I couldn’t resist when I saw this beautiful squash at their stand while waiting in line to pay for my many bags of beans.  Several people even commented on my arms full of beans.  I overheard someone say “now there’s a bean lover”.  Guilty as charged, but I do have a good excuse in that we don’t live in Portland, right?

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Borscht

I have never thought that borscht looked like a soup that I would like to eat, let alone make.  But our visit to Belly changed my opinion of borscht.  Brian ordered borscht for dinner and kindly let us all taste it and it was delicious.  I think the color is what turned me off.  Its kind of a weird color for soup – it reminds me of the soup that Renee Zellweger makes in Bridget Jones Diary (instead of using standard kitchen string for the bouquet garni, she uses red string that turns the soup pink).

We had some roasted beets leftover from our roasted beet salad, plus potatoes and carrots from our CSA, and a head of savoy cabbage from our Eugene Local Foods order – a majority of the ingredients for borscht.  I bought some chicken thighs to add to the soup, but forgot about them – I bet they would be delicious.  

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A Local Thanksgiving

We have a tradition of gathering in Sunriver, OR for Thanksgiving with about 10-12 friends that are also Oregon transplants. This is my 10^th Sunriver Thanksgiving and Matt’s 12^th. We rent a big house that fits all of us and everyone pitches in with some part of the meal either by making a dish or cleaning up. It is one of my favorite weekends of the year. The last few years, we have made more of an effort to use local foods. We even won a Farmaid contest last year.

We neglected to order a turkey from Deck early enough this year so when we contacted them, they were all gone. We tried a few other potential sources with no luck, so our turkey this year was from California. Besides the turkey, most of our other main ingredients were local. A detailed ingredient source list is below.

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