I just spent a day at the CalWIC conference. This is an educational conference for people who work for the government WIC (Womens, Infants, Children) agency. As a company that sells breastfeeding DVDs, we vendor at these type of conferences. Yet I don’t sell much at these type of conferences. See I have to watch the stock & pass out fliers. Because at a WIC conference most of the vendors are passing out free cereal or other free item. So the attendees kinda think EVERYTHING in the exhibit hall is free
But the nice thing about a that is you never go hungry! There is fruit and juice and cereal galore! I was across the isle from a new grocer and they were serving delicious food one of which was a to-die-for Butternut Squash Soup, complete with recipe.
Ah, but it turns out Sex God was due to bring in food for 15 for his work lunch group so we decided to cook up the Squash soup. It was either that or our Mole sauce which I knew took a lot of time. We popped over to the market to get our 1 missing ingredient when I realized the recipe fed 4 and we needed to feed 20 (me & the kids for dinner that night). So we ended up filling 2 handcarts with celery & carrots & veggie stock & anything else I needed…like desert!
Then Sex God and I began peeling and chopping and I quickly realized that this was NOT going to fit into one pot! Hell, it took 6 bowls to HOLD all the prepped veggies! So I quickly got a second (and then a third!) pot and began to try and brown the veggies per the recipe instructions. That completely didn’t work! So we just loaded them up with stock and boiled them which was the second step.
Lucky for me I’d snagged a roasted chicken from Vons & threw this meat at the kids for dinner. That and raw carrots and by the time we were finally cooking the veggies it was “Here’s desert!”
Once everything was all cooked I realized the next challenge was the fact my blender wasn’t going to do this in one go! Add to that the fact the realization that each pot didn’t have the exact same ingredients so we needed to blend them all together and I’d not even added the spices yet! But we managed it by working together although I quickly had to modify the recipe!
See I’d tasted it before and I knew how it should taste and what we had was too celery tasting. Now it’s possible this was due to not being able to brown it, so for next time I’m cooking a single batch & maybe using my large skillet first! In any case, I was able to finally get it to a nice squash, sweet curry taste that satisfied me. All of it! And I was amazed at how easy soup was to make. I’m looking forward to trying more creamy soups 🙂
Sex God made a perfect assistant and took my huge black pot filled with soup to work along with the half loaf of multigrain bread I had left. (Not a problem since I went shopping the next day.) And I still had a quart to put in my freezer and a quart to put in my fridge. We got it all finished by 9pm! Luke & Evan were still awake and both wanted a taste so I took a spoonful up to them. That got a delicious thumbs up.
This is the SECOND load of dishes they had to do!
Haha…. Wait till they see the mess they’ll get to clean up! The upside to having slaves kids.