Seasonal Soup and some Homebrew

Yes, I eat pumpkins. And they taste amazing.

Specifically, pumpkin soup. If you're really adverse to eating pumpkins, you can do this with any winter squash, though I don't know why you would want to.

"Winter Squash Soup"
This recipe comes from Laurel's Kitchen which my mom gave me :) Makes about 7 cups of soup.

Pumpkin soup simmering with the roasted seeds in front.

5 cup cubed raw winter squash or 3 cups cooked winter squash
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 Tbsp oil
1/2 cup parsley (I actually omitted this and used some sage instead)
2 tsp salt
1 tsp basil
1 cup dried skim milk (I use more like 1/2 or 1/3 cup)
1 Tbsp torula yeast (same as nutritional yeast flakes as far as I can tell, which is what I used. And I used at least triple that because I love it)
Optional: 1 pound fresh spinach, a couple tomatoes, a red pepper, or whatever you feel like adding.

If you're using raw squash/pumpkin, cook it in a large pot in the broth until it is tender, then blend it until it is the consistency you want.

Saute the onion in the oil until soft, then add parsley. Cook just long enough to soften the parsley, then add, along with the seasonings, to the squash in the soup pot.

Add the milk powder and yeast and blend in well (the book suggests taking out a cup of the squash and mixing all this together in a blender, but I don't do that). Bring the soup to a simmer. Add the spinach at the very end. I also use the pumpkin seeds by roasting them in the oven with some oil and salt and then adding them on top. It gives it a nice texture.

Pumpkin soup with spinach and red peppers. Get in my belly!

I also brewed some beer with a couple friends a little over a week ago. I wasn't sure I was ever going to homebrew again, but it was fun to brew with some new people. And I used some of my grain share rye! It will hopefully be a delicious rye IPA style beer. We put about 3 pounds of flaked rye in and a ton of hops.

Whole hops, I love how you smell!

None of us had ever used raw grains before so we chatted up the people at the homebrew shop, who were extremely helpful. Even though I had flaked the rye it had not been heated up in any way, so I needed to cook the rye, which we did by boiling it in a gallon or so of water for 15 minutes and then added all of the water and cooked rye to the brew kettle (which contained the rest of the water).

Malted barley on the left, rye on the right

It will be transferred to the secondary fermenter this weekend, then bottled a week or two after that! I am so excited to try it!