Saturday Lunch Shenanigans

There's something quintessentially autumnal about the colour orange. Orange leaves on the ground, orange pumpkins at Halloween, oranges on sale in fruit shops as tart satsumas and juicy tangerines come into season.  Orange in the clothes shops, threaded through a woolly bobble hat or mittens set, along with other warming maroons and browns.  Orange on your legs perhaps, as you grasp at the last straws of summer by flocking to the nearest bottle of fake tan.  So it's fitting that my first blog post for a new term at uni in the middle of autumn, should be about a bowl of orange soup.  Or rather - a butternut squash, potato and red pepper melange of bright flavours and velvety textures that will warm your heart and fill your belly.

I have discovered, close to our new house, an absolute gem of an organic fruit and veg shop.  "Alligator", on Fulford Road York, is an Aladdin's cave for any ethical-minded foodie; all its produce from locally sourced potatoes, to chocolate, to rice, to yoghurt, to olive oil, to spinach, is organic. I made my first sojourn to this corner of cuisinal curiosity this saturday morning, after pausing in my morning of diligent study (!) with a hankering for the hot stuff. And by that I mean saturday soup.

Saturday soup is a recent phenomenon in our family at home, where everyone seems to meander back to the ranch round about lunchtime after various cafe shifts and weekend jobs, to reconvene over one kind of soup or another. Sometimes it happens in life that you hit upon a meal which coincides beautifully with the mood of the day, say, pasta and pesto for energy before training for example, and saturday soup is one of those. It perfectly suits the productive yet happy feeling of a saturday, and as a self-confessed creature of habit I have absorbed it fully into my food-at-uni-routine.

So to the soup.  After having selected a small but tasty looking squash, a couple of muddy potatoes and a loaf of sour-dough bread from aforementioned shop, I began the cooking process. Another reason to love soup: it's so so easy to make. Here is what to do:

Butternut squash, red pepper and potato soup

1x squash

A few potatoes

1 x red pepper

Salt, pepper, chilli powder, paprika

1 x onion

1 litre vegetable stock

Dice all vegetables into chunks.

Heat onion in some oil in large pan until soft. Add seasoning to this.  Chilli powder works well with the sweetness of the squash, so the soup has a bit of a kick.

Add all veg into pan and 'sweat' for a few mins while you make stock.

Make stock.

Add to pan and bring to boil, adjusting seasoning.

Lower heat and simmer til vegetables are soft, usually for about 15/20 mins.

Take off heat and blend using hand blender, or other.

Serve with slices of sour dough bread, wedges of cheddar cheese and some cherry tomatoes. Drizzle in balsamic vinegar, the sour dough bread is great at soaking this up.

Sit back and enjoy the different tastes and colours, and wonder whether autumn might not actually be your favourite season after all.

Next post: Falalfel Mania