Day 1 of Shopping at Home: Curried Zucchini Soup

 Well, I survived Day 1 of shopping at home.  No farmer’s market!  No quick trip to the grocery!  I was sorely tempted, but…my first priority was to get rid of leftovers, which we did for the most part at lunch.  Second, I needed to pay full attention to my vegetable drawer, the first place I end up wasting food.  I tend to over-buy fresh veggies anyway, and having a garden this summer exacerbated that problem.  I opened my veggie drawer and found the most pressing to be the last of my garden zucchini, a half of my last monster zucchini left over, and another which had been sadly neglected.  I looked over my recipe from my not-so-new New Basics Cookbook; the recipe called for six zucchini.Well, the size of these could count for at least three store-bought zucchini, I thought.  I cut the bad spots off and grated them with my box grater to make about three cups. Guess I would have to start foraging in the freezer for the rest.

 

A trip to the freezer meant Discovery and Purging (heretofore referred to as D & P).

Discovered:  1. Store brand frozen onions.  I have no idea what possessed me to buy frozen diced onions, except maybe they were on sale, or maybe I thought about those very few times in my life I haven’t had onions in the house, or haven’t felt like cutting them up.  No date on them, but I don’t remember buying them.  Oh, well, worth a try.

2.  Shredded frozen yellow squash.  Again, no date (boo!), but I do remember shredding and freezing a lot of yellow squash last summer.  Or was it the summer before…? These could be used in place of zucchini.

3.  Two containers of Triple S chicken broth, one container with a cracked lid.  These needed to be rescued for sure.  There was a generous layer of fat on top that could be scooped off before adding to the soup.

4. Three wild-caught cod fillets.  I was craving fish, and it would be a nice accompaniment to the soup.

5.  Frozen fried apples.  Dessert would be easy.

Purged:  1. Edamame, freezer-burnt to a pale yellow color.  Ick. 

2. A bag of corn from 2009.  Wasn’t sure it was still corn.

3. A package of Mission whole-wheat tortillas, now mostly in tiny pieces after being jostled about for a substantial amount of time.

I managed to sauté the frozen onions in butter after cooking off the inevitable goopy water that comes with frozen vegetables.  I added three tablespoons of curry instead of five, as I knew my son wouldn’t like that much zing.  I added the partially thawed, de-fatted broth and three peeled and diced potatoes, and brought to a boil.  After the potatoes cooked, I added salt, pepper, the shredded zucchini, and the shredded yellow squash, then brought to another boil and simmered for 15 or 20 minutes while my fish was baking (I had prepped the fish with a simple spritz of coconut oil and a topping of gomasio, a simple but tasty blend of sesame seeds and sea salt). I substituted a can of coconut milk for the cream in the soup recipe, then used my immersion blender to make it creamy.  The color was an inviting yellow, the color of most of the leaves covering our lawn.

I heated the frozen fried apples up on the stove, and then served them warm with a dollop of the last of the season’s vanilla custard from our local Jarling’s Custard Cup.

The result was a perfect, warming fall meal.  So far, so good, and leftovers for lunch tomorrow!