Slowing Down

It's been a few weeks of quite a few new recipes for this kitchen, but it's time to slow down in an effort to keep to our grocery budget. This week's goal is to buy fresh fruits and vegetables and little else. Even when we're not on a budget, I like to do this - it's a great way to force yourself to dig into the pantry and the freezer and use up some of the things that tend to linger - collecting dust or ice crystals. I'll be cooking, just not much in the way of new recipes.

Smoked Sausage, Butternut Squash and Wild Rice Soup

I still have a few recipes to share though! The first one is from this weekend. I made this soup - from Emeril on Food Network - for the first time a while back in an effort to get us to try butternut squash. We were watching Emeril's show and my son said we had to try this recipe! Who am I to deny such a request?

The squash is pureed and used as a base for the broth and is paired with smoked sausage, corn and wild rice. We really like this soup and it was the perfect way to try a new vegetable - sometimes trying a new vegetable as a background to other foods you already love can be a great way to get familiar with it and open the door to other experiments down the line.

It's not written as a low-fat recipe, but with all of the other flavors involved, I think you could easily get away with substituting a lower fat milk for the half and half. If it were a butternut squash puree with little else added, the half and half would be a lot more critical, but the chicken broth, wild rice and sausage can carry the flavor of this soup without the added fat. This time around I used the half and half, but I did cut the fat by using a turkey smoked sausage which is much lower in fat than the regular version.

Since butternut squash is the base of this soup, I think I'll submit it for Sweetnicks' ARF/5-A-Day round-up tomorrow night. This is a great soup to try if, like us, your family is not exactly enamored of squash. Be sure to visit Sweetnicks tomorrow to see all of the other veggie recipes joining the round-up.

I may not try any new recipes for dinner this week, but I wonder if I'll be able to resist baking - as long as I already have the ingredients on hand...................