Squash Soup: A Pictorial Essay

On Friday, my coworker gave me the last of her summer squash:

It took me awhile to decide what to do with them, but recipe searches convinced me that the best thing to make would be soup since my only other option was casserole. I prefer soup infinitely over casserole. However, what I discovered in my search was that--just as with butternut squash--crazy people tend to make spicy-sweet soups out of summer squash. I will never be able to hang out with sweet soup, so I decided to make a bastardized version of an Epicurious recipe combined with Kelly S's very delicious butternut squash soup.

I chopped the squash into little pieces:

and roasted it with olive oil, salt, pepper, and cumin (cumin is the roasted vegetable's best friend). And about 4-5 cloves of garlic, chopped up and spread around.

In the meantime, I rendered the fat of 1 piece of bacon, removed and ate the bacon (yay!), melted 3 tbsp butter and sauteed a chopped onion for 8 minutes. After that, I added 4 cups of chicken broth and one russet potato, thinly sliced, and simmered for 15 minutes:

I added the roasted summer squash, which had actually been in the refrigerator overnight because I roasted it on Sunday before attending a movie called The Last Mistress--basically a costume drama-cum-soft core porn in which a woman literally turns a man into her fuck stick. Bet you didn't think you'd see that when you started reading this! But seriously, it had many unnecessarily graphic (yet hilarious) sex scenes that did little to further the plot. Anyway, here's how the squash looked after roasting:

and after being added to the soup:

(my kitchen has terrible lighting). I cooked that until the squash was heated and the potatoes were tender, about 10 more minutes. Then I added salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, and the tiniest amount of turmeric--really, I did little more than show the bottle of turmeric to the pot of soup. Then I blended the shit out of it with a hand mixer and added about 1/3 cup of heavy whipping cream:

and ate it with a dollop of pesto (pesto makes everything better!) and garlic loaf:

Muy delicioso!