Squash production - soup and cheescake

Hubby is out tonight so what do I do all evening ? Of course I am spending it in the kitchen!
Two cakes and a soup. My result tonight. The second cake is still in the oven so must become a part of a different story.

Coquina squash soup and squash& curd cheese cheesecake with a blueberries sauce

Coquina squash soup
Serves 4

Ingredients:
1/2 a leek - only green top part sliced
1 parsnip peeled and sliced
1 carrot peeled and sliced
600g peeled and cubed coquina squash
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp chili flakes
1/2 tsp ground ginger
20g butter a little oil
3 cubes of vegetarian oxo 
salt and pepper

Let's do it:
Melt the butter with a little bit of oil in a big pan. Add leeks and spices - chili flakes, cumin, ginger and fry for a few minutes.Then add all vegetables and crushed oxo cubes with your fingers and mix well until coated in spices, fry until starting sticking to the bottom. Pour hot water from the kettle - enough to cover vegetables and simmer until they are tender which takes around 15 minutes. Blend with a hand blender. Serve with creme fraiche and almond flakes if you like. Toasted or not toasted if you like. 

Squash & curd cheese cheesecake with blueberries sauce

This is an oddity, I used Dan Lepard's recipe Pumpkin cheescake as an inspiration but had my crazy professor moment and did all differently. I recommend using Dan's recipe. 
Aah and then there was the catastrophe when trying to transfer the cheesecake to a plate! Cutting long story short it became an upside down floor cheesecake! I wasn't sure if I should laugh or cry. Managed to rescue most and covered it with the blueberries sauce to keep its dignity!

Ingredients:
Base
For the base I recommend using Dan's recipe as I did a very odd thing - I crushed all sorts of biscuits - to be specific salted crackers, caramel digestives and hobnobs but kept the weight of 170g and then added around 50g of butter, blitzed it in a food processor and transferred to the spring form loose bottom tin. Left in the fridge to solidify.

Cheesecake
Now this is a bizarre concoction, again you may choose Dan's recipe. I simply experimented with what I had available so here they are:
300g coquina squash peeled and cut in small cubes
250g curd cheese (this can be replaced with quark)
150g  of vanilla cheese (serek waniliowy) easy to find in a polish shop but can be replace with a thick yogurt like onken or creme fraiche and added more sugar to compensate
3 eggs
1 tsp of vanilla extract
50g of brown sugar or more if using creme fraiche or yogurt
1 tbsp of lemon juice


Blueberry sauce
1 punnet (250g) of blueberries
30g brown sugar
1 tbsp of lemon juice

Let's do it:
Preheat the oven to 140C fan assisted. Boil the squash until soft, drain in a colander and leave to cool completely. In a food processor blend the squash with vanilla extract and sugar. Add curd cheese or quark and blitz again. Using a spatula scrape the bottom and sides each time you add another ingredient, add serek waniliowy or replacement and blitz briefly, finally add lemon juice eggs and do the final blitz. Transfer to the tin with the base, the mixture may seem a bit liquid but it will be fine. Bake in the preheated oven for 50 - 60 minutes. 
In a small sauce pan boil blueberries with sugar and lemon juice until start bursting. Leave it to cool completely. Pour over the cheesecake when both are completely cold.

Roasted squash and potato soup

I'm even dreading to write this yet again but I will anyway - it's absolutely freezing out there!
So tonight yet another variation of a soup for a warm supper.

Roasted squash & potato soup with crème fraîche and roasted spices

Ingredients:
puree of roasted butternut squash or coquina squash - sliced, deseeded and roasted with rapeseed oil, salt and pepper for 40 minutes in 190C until tender and can be easily mashed with fork. Skin easy to removed after baking. I had about 500g before roasting
small knob of butter and a bit (1tsp) of sunflower oil
2 medium shallots peeled and roughly chopped
2 garlic cloves peeled and roughly chopped potatoes peeled and boiled until tender - around 250g
milk - 100-150ml
1,5 ltr water but possibly more

Roasted coquina squash potato & dry fried spices soup

veggie stock
1tsp paprika
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
pinch of cinnamon
salt and pepper

Action:
Melt a small knob of butter with a bit of oil in a pan and fry shallots with garlic on a low heat for 5 minutes, add spices and fry for further 2 minutes. Next add squash puree, sliced potatoes, stock, water to cover vegetables and some pepper. Bring to boil and blend, add more water if needed, milk salt and pepper and check the taste. Serve with crème fraîche and roasted spices. 
For roasted spices dry fry on a medium gas 4 allspice berries, 1 tbsp of cumin seeds and 1 tsp of nigella seeds. When spices start being aromatic and cumin turns brown turn the gas off, transfer to mortar and bash with pestle ensuring that allspice turns into a powder whereas cumin and nigella seeds do not need to be powdered.
 

Pumpkin / japanese squash soup

Pumpkin / japanese squash soup with chipotles en adobo & crème fraîche - at a guess no precise measurements recipe

It's 18 March and it's still freezing in London, winter is not going anywhere so the only way to beat the blues is to have a bowl of pumpkin soup!
 
Now I am really sorry but I do not use precise measurements, it's at a guess cooking but at its easiest.

Ingredients:
approx. 500g pumpkin or japanese squash peeled, deseeded and diced
a bit of butter/ a bit of oil
2 veggie stock cubes
hot water
milk
2 banana shallots peeled and roughly chopped
1 tsp chilli flakes
spices - I used rather many!: cumin, corriander, fenugreek, paprika, ginger (all powder)
salt&pepper

Melt butter with a bit of oil so it won't burn and add shallots, fry for a few minutes. Add chilli flakes and all other spices fry a bit longer then add the squash and stir well, fry for a short while. Add crumbled stock and hot water to cover the squash. Simmer on a low gas until the squash is tender (approx. 15-20 min). Blend the soup, add seasoning and approx. 1/2 glass of milk. Stir well and reheat if needed. 
Serve with crème fraîche and chopped parsley. As it is horrible out there my body is crying for spices so I am using chipotles en adobo a lot these days. In this case I added some to crème fraîche before serving. It is a wonderfully smoked puree and brings another dimension to everything you add it to. The recipe for chipotles an adobo comes from a wonderful mexican cookbook by Thomasina Miers "Mexican Food Made Simple"