Pre-Dinner snackeroo. Homemade dough, homemade garlic cherry tomato sauce, bocconcini, pepper salami, kalamata olives, arugula and basil. 

Pizza Dough Recipe

Judging from my posts one might be fooled to believe I have an obsession with squash and soup. Mmmmm, not quite. I do have a fondness for buying squash at the farmers market, how could I not when they are always in season and look so cool! But then I get home and they sit on my table going bad while I try to justify why the hell I bought yet another squash. I usually end up making the squash recipes on a lazy Sunday afternoon with no time constraints and little hope that they will turn out, giving me lots of time (and daylight) to take pictures. So on that little note any squash recipe suggestions besides soup and bread would be greatly appreciated as I fear my squash buying days are far from over. 

Ingredients:
1 small butternut squash
1 carrot
2 cloves garlic
1 small onion
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 celery stick
5 cups homemade chicken or veggie stock
Salt and pepper to taste

Optional Topping Suggestions:
Goat cheese
Pea Sprouts (or any other sprouts)
Cream

Directions:
Roast butternut squash and carrot in the oven at 375 or frying pan until soft. Mix remaining ingredients to the stock and simmer for 10 minutes. Add cooked squash and carrot to broth and simmer another 20 minutes until everything is nice and soft. Take a big spoon and scoop out the chunky bits (squash, carrot, onion, celery) in batches and transfer to blender. This allows you to slowly add the desired amount of stock while blending in order to customize your soup thickness.  Top with anything you might like or have plain.

Notes:
Pea Sprouts: YUM! This was the first time I’ve tried pea spouts and they went amazingly with the soup. 
Homemade stock:  THE most important thing, it will make a world of difference to your soup. I’m a horrible stock maker, I throw anything and everything into the pot, cover with water and let simmer for 2-3 hours. It wasn’t until I actually read a proper recipe that I realized how wrong I was doing it. I don’t really care if it has little floaty bits and is cloudy, it always taste good.
Ingredients: I usually eyeball all ingredients so this is a guestimate of amounts. Use your common sense and adjust everything to your liking. Don’t have something? Improvise! 

Bread made with squash - can you believe it!? I really didn’t think this was going to work but I needed something to make with the cute mini “sweet squash” I bought at the winter’s farmers market. I baked the squash and tried to eat it plain but I’m not much of a plain food kinna girl. Searching for something to make I found this recipe and decided to give it a go, reading through the comments I opted to make a few changes. I sprinkled some Italian herbs (basil, rosemary and thyme) with the flour so that when I rolled the dough out it picked up all the yummy herbs. I sprinkled a hefty amount or coarse sea salt onto the top of the braided loaf before putting it in the oven and brushed the loaf with olive oil instead of the suggested egg wash. This made an AMAZING sweet bread with the texture of a croissant and since I was too lazy to mash the squash it had beautiful little yellow squash fibres throughout. Hurrah!