winter squash this winter
The boys have been asking for squash soup for, like, a week. Squash soup and garlic biscuits, to be precise. But there were some snags in making it happen: most notably, the fact that we didn't have any squash. After four or five years of great squash crops we had a complete failure this past summer. Animals ate all the initial seedlings, then I wasn't able to get replacements in until much too late, so despite some healthy-looking vines at the end of the season only a single squash was able to reach maturity. Naturally we ate it a long time ago, along with all the ones I bought at the farmers market to compensate. So the centerpiece of this evening's soup had to come from Whole Foods, and sadly it wasn't that good. Not terrible, mind you—it's a butternut squash, how much could go wrong? But it wasn't bursting with flavor, even well-roasted, and it lost out to the celery in the final taste profile. So sad.
It's the time of year when we're starting to think of the new farming season. This year I'm teaming up with my friend Angel: she's going to order and start all the greens and things, and I'm going to do tomatoes and peppers. This is catering to our core competencies, and I expect it will make both our gardens stronger. After the dinner this evening I think I'll add winter squash to the list of things I start indoors, just to be on the safe side in case we get a repeat attack from the critters. Because you know we need our squash!