A Tale of Two Soups: Curried Squash & Fiery Coconut Tofu

It was the best of soups... it was the worst of soups...

Yes, one soup was gorgeous, the other was the first truly inedible thing I've made this year.

Bad soup first.

The Recipe: Fiery Tofu & Coconut Curry Soup
From a copy of Cooking Light magazine that appeared in our mailbox.

One thing I've (re)learned through all this cooking is just how trusting aka gullible aka dimwitted I am. Oh, what a lot of curry paste that is, she says to herself as she obediently dumps it into the pot.

When, of course, what a sensible person would say is: A quarter-cup of curry paste?!! That can't be right! And would then cross-check in some other recipes and find that it is right only if you never want to feel your lips again.

The bizarre thing is that, if the comments are to be believed, people have fed this to their children!!

As for us, we picked out the tofu and vegetables, nibbled on them as best we could, and sadly threw the soup away.

I dunno - maybe our curry paste is just much stronger than the stuff they used... But the idea of the soup was nice, and maybe one day years from now when the memory of nuclear-holocaust-mouth has sufficiently faded (and Jack has forgotten what he delicately called his "ring of fire" the next day) I'll try it again with some crucial adjustments.

Now - the nice soup.

The Recipe: Curried Butternut Squash Soup
From Emily Weinstein on the NYTimes Bitten blog.

I actually first made this back in January, at the beginning of this whole enterprise, but didn't take any pictures. We were excited to have it again - it's really delicious, with just a light curried flavor :)

Made about 3/4 of the recipe, which is more than enough, and used some parsnips and sweet potato to supplement the half a butternut squash that we had - the parsnips especially turned out to be a nice addition.

It did come out a little thick, as Emily says, but we liked it that way, and you can always dilute it.

Pix