Cozy Squash Soup with Grilled Mozzarella

Plus: A New Newsletter Format, Quince Tarte Tatin, and Houston's Boca.

Hey newsletter friends,

I’m giving you a gift this December and it’s a gift I should’ve given you long ago: from now on, my newsletter is going to give you RECIPES.

Yes, I know, that’s probably the most obvious thing in the world — that a cooking newsletter should have recipes — but for years of writing this newsletter (maybe a decade of writing this newsletter?), I’ve always thought that it was more worthwhile to jam it with lots of food content so that it was more of a gestalt of culinary inspiration rather than a specific guide on how to make this food at home.

Now I’m thinking: why can’t it be both? So, going forward, each Monday the newsletter will be divided into three sections: The Recipe, The Restaurant, and The Rest. You’ll still get to see everything I’ve been up to foodwise in a given week, only now it’ll be more organized and useful. What’s not to love? So let’s do it!

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The Recipe: Butternut Squash and Apple Soup with Grilled Mozzarella Sandwiches

Last week, we had our friend Jonathan over for dinner. His fella Ryan’s in New Orleans shooting the new Queer as Folk, so I wanted to cook up a cozy winter night’s dinner to make him feel right at home. I had a butternut squash that I bought from Cookbook in Echo Park and also some beautiful apples and I immediately thought of Ina’s butternut squash soup with apples that has curry powder and apple cider, so I decided to riff on that.

I used onions and butter and olive oil, plus I threw in some fresh ginger just to shake things up. Instead of water, I used chicken stock (check out my latest stock-making video, it’s so easy) and then, to round out the dinner, I sliced sourdough bread and fresh mozzarella and made grilled mozzarella sandwiches.

What’s great about mozzarella here is that it’s a more neutral cheese that interacts nicely with the soup, which I finished up with a splash of apple cider vinegar. The sweetness and acidity of the soup made it the perfect vehicle for dunking.

Serves 4

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons butter, plus more for the grilled cheese

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for the grilled cheese

1 yellow onion, chopped

Kosher salt

1 tablespoon fresh ginger, peeled and grated

1 tablespoon curry powder (plus more as needed)

1 medium-sized butternut squash, peeled and roughly chopped (be careful! Discard the seeds and the stringy bits)

2 apples, whichever you like, peeled, cored, and roughly chopped

2 cups chicken stock, plus more as needed

2 cups apple cider

A splash of apple cider vinegar

8 slices of good sourdough

A log of fresh mozzarella (not packed in water), about 16 ounces — you won’t use all of it, but it’s good to have too much

1. In a large pot or Dutch oven, melt the butter with the olive oil on medium-high heat. Add the onion, plus a pinch of salt, and sauté until the onion is translucent, about three minutes. Add the ginger and curry powder and cook another minute until fragrant.

2. Add the squash and the apples, another pinch of salt, and stir all around. I like to cook it for a bit here to get some color on the squash. It may take a little while because of the liquid that’ll come out: you can skip this step and go straight to adding the stock and cider, but if you have the time, getting a little brownness on the squash adds more flavor later.

3. Add the chicken stock and apple cider — it should cover all of the squash and the apples. Keep in mind: if it covers the squash and apples too much, you’ll have a very liquidy soup. If it barely covers the squash and apples too little, you’ll have a very thick soup. It’s really your preference. (You can always go thick and add more liquid later.) Add a healthy teaspoon or two of salt and simmer for thirty minutes or so, until a knife goes through the squash easily.

4. Turn the heat off the soup and using a hand blender, blend the soup for several minutes, until you’re pretty sure you’ve gotten every solid bit in there. (It’s okay if you miss an onion or two.) Here’s where you taste. When I tasted, I found it a little too sweet, so I adjusted with lots of salt and apple cider vinegar and more curry powder. Keep adding salt and vinegar and curry powder and stirring and tasting until it pops.

5. To make the grilled cheese, assemble your sandwiches by slicing the mozzarella, laying it on to four pieces of the sourdough, seasoning the mozzarella with salt, and topping with the remaining bread. In a large non-stick or cast iron skillet, melt another few tablespoons of butter with olive oil on medium-high heat (you want the bottom of the skillet to have a layer of fat). When the butter melts and the foam subsides, add all of the sandwiches.

6. Lower the heat to medium-low and cover the pan. (This is a trick I learned from Craig to help the cheese melt.) Cook this way, monitoring every few minutes, until the cheese is really starting to melt and the bottom of the bread is getting toasty. Flip with a spatula and continue cooking on medium-low heat until the cheese is completely melted and the bread is golden brown on both sides. Serve on a platter with the pot of soup and let everyone serve themselves.

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The Restaurant: Houston’s Boca

In my Florida round-up last week, I left out one of the best meals that we ate: the one that we had at Houston’s in Boca after my parents picked us up in Ft. Lauderdale.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in many a newsletter, Houston’s is one of our favorite restaurants. Even though it’s a chain, it always delivers. That consistency — which many chefs, including David Chang, say is the hardest thing for restaurants to achieve — makes it a winner every time.

Here are my parents while we waited for a table.

And here’s my order, my go-to when I don’t get the hamburger: the ribs with French fries and coleslaw.

These ribs are something else. You can eat them with a knife and fork: they fall right off the bone. And the sauce is so tangy and rich, it makes a case for BBQ sauce being one of the all-time great sauces up there with Mornay and Bolognese.

The crowd in Boca is pretty intense, so this cartoon hanging on the wall by the entrance made me laugh.

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The Rest: Quince Tarte Tatin, Ben Mims’s Fruitcake, Dan Ahdoot on Lunch Therapy, and Links

That same night that I cooked for Jonathan, I’d picked up some quince at Cookbook and decided to play with them.

In case you’re unfamiliar, quince are like really, really hard apples that you can’t eat raw. You have to poach them for at least thirty minutes, often longer, usually in a syrup that contains sugar and cinnamon and sometimes a vanilla bean. (I almost bought a vanilla bean, but it was too $$ so I skipped it.) Otherwise, I followed David Lebovitz’s recipe which includes a lemon and a smattering of spices.

When the quince finished poaching, I thought about serving them with vanilla ice cream. But then I remembered how much I love making pastry these days, so I decided to follow David’s directions for a quince tarte tatin. You basically reduce the quince syrup into a caramel, layer the quince in, and roll out a pastry on top.

All of this made the house smell beautiful. The only downside was trying to get it out of the pan! (See here.) That’s why the main pic above is a little clunky, but boy did it taste good. More complex than apple pie and the texture’s a bit firmer too.

In other fruity dessert news, Ben Mims had us over the other night to test some Christmas recipes on us. We swore ourselves to secrecy (he’ll publish his recipes in The LA Times food section soon enough), but he did let me take a picture of him with his fruitcake.

I’m not a big fruitcake guy, but boy is this one good: boozy and fruity and choc full of nuts. I’ve been having a little bit for breakfast every day (which may explain why I’m drunk.)

On Lunch Therapy this week, we have stand-up comedian Dan Ahdoot:

You may know Dan from his work on Cobra Kai, or from his upcoming Food Network show Raid the Fridge. Our session covers everything from pre-arranged marriages to Turmeric to new sensitivities in the world of comedy and the world of food, and how he gets anxious about missing the best places when he travels. CLICK HERE to listen. And if you like it, please leave a nice review!

Now for the links that caught my attention this week:

• Love this Priya Krishna article on who owns a recipe (NYT);

• Bliss out watching a bell pepper grow in front of you (Kottke);

• Ruth Reichl has a new newsletter and I’m really enjoying it so far, though her pace is freaking me out (Substack);

• A chef is sentenced to jail after someone died from his shepherd’s pie. Is this the first time a chef’s gone to jail for mishandling the food? (The Guardian).

That’s all for this week, folks!

In case you missed it, my Thursday newsletter was a gift guide featuring all of this things I’m asking Santa for this year (including Ina’s spatula and Balsamic). If you’d like to read that, plus have access to my full archives, here’s a discount code that makes it ridiculously cheap to subscribe.

Until next time!

Your friend,

Adam