It’s a bit easier if you cut up all the ingredients before hand for this recipe. Also if you own an immersion blender like my fabulous Cuisinart CSB-76 Smart Stick Hand Blender; otherwise you’ll need to use a food processor to puree 1/2 the ingredients.

Also, Hatch chiles are key. Go get some – in Texas, you’ll find tons of hatch chiles (literally!) at Central Market. (And more Hatch chile recipes too.)

Ingredients:

1 yellow onion, diced
2 tbsp butter
1 butternut squash – peeled, seeded & cut into 1″ cubes
4 ears worth of fresh corn kernels (remove from the cob with a knife)
4 fresh Hatch chiles, roasted and cut into 1/2″ squares (keep the seeds!)
~3 cups vegetable broth
1/2 cup heavy cream
pinch salt
pepper to taste
Method:

In a stock pot over medium heat, melt butter. Add onion and butternut squash; saute until onion is translucent adding a bit of salt and pepper along the way.

Meanwhile, roast your Hatch chiles. (If you didn’t buy them that way. Quick tip for those in Houston: Central Market sells fresh Hatch chiles already roasted. You’ll want 1 – 1.25 cups.)

Add enough vegetable broth to cover butternut squash mixture, then add corn. Cover pot and bring to a gentle boil until butternut squash is tender, about 20-25 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside half of mixture without liquid.

This is the fun part: Use your fabulous immersion blender and blend everything in the pot up real nicely, which will probably take about 5-7 minutes. More if it’s been one of those days.

Next, on low-medium heat, return the set aside portion to the pot. Stir in heavy cream. Stir in hatch chiles. While simmering for 10 minutes, tweak salt and pepper to taste.

Enjoy!

As I mentioned last week, I’m a huge fan of soup for dinner. It’s easy to make, good for the waistline, and good for the body. And it’s just the thing for the cool fall/winter nights. (Yes, even though I’m in Houston, it gets a bit chilly here. To be sure, it’s no Iowa, but overnight temps now regularly visit the 30’s.)

A Texas favorite is tortilla soup. For years, I missed out on it in restaurants and “easy-make” versions, though, because my strict vegetarian food choices conflicted with the liberal use of chicken and chicken stock in most recipes. Even once I added fish and discovered a meat-free version at a local fine grocery store, I still felt the meal lacked “umph.” A couple of veggies, some veggie broth, and oodles of boiled tortilla shells isn’t exactly the bastion of nutrition.

Imagine my delight when, strolling the soup aisles during a recent visit to Central Market, I discovered South of the Border Tortilla Soup by Frontier Soups. No chicken broth listed in the ingredients, and a substantial base corn and black beans. Sweet.

South of the Border Tortilla Soup (Frontier Soups) - Our tortilla soup mix is a sure-fire winner! This chicken tortilla soup is so good it may call for a party. Add chicken, salsa and chips for this Mexican specialty. ($6)

I modified the directions on back, and boiled the ingredients in vegetable broth instead of chicken broth. I made Graham a separate pot of boiled, shredded chicken to include in his bowl, but I wondered if there was something more I could add to give it a bit of umph for me. Since I added fish into my diet a year ago, I wondered if a bit of shrimp would work. (Until now, I’d never heard of shrimp tortilla soup. This version sure looks good too, doesn’t it? )

The choice of salsa the recipe calls for is huge. I used a roasted habanero salsa that was HOT, but added a nice roasted flavor to the meal. This particular salsa was completely pureed, so we did not have small bits of tomato floating about in the soup. The 8 oz of salsa the recipe calls for (about 1/2 a jar) is really a matter entirely of personal choice, and I could envision a scenario where I made each batch of this soup differently.

The soup itself cooks up nicely. In previous soups I’ve used with dehydrated black beans, despite cooking for the prescribed time period, the black beans remain grainy and dehydrated. Not so with the Frontier Soups version, which cook up quite nicely and provide an extra bit of fiber to the meal.

As for the addition of shrimp, that stroke of genius worked out marvelously.