Kin Schilling virtually shares Cornucopia Project recipe for butternut squash soup

By ASHLEY SAARI

Monadnock Ledger-Transcript

Published: 11-18-2021 9:34 AM

Kin Schilling has shared the perfect fall recipe – a butternut squash soup recipe first conceived through collaboration with the children of the Cornucopia Project.

Schilling was the most recent teacher for the Hancock Town Library’s “Cooking with...” series, where local residents share their favorite recipes. The series is currently running virtually through Zoom, which allowed Schilling, who now lives in Colorado after nearly 40 years living in the Monadnock region, to revisit her home town and share a recipe first concocted in Hancock.

When invited to share a fall recipe, Schilling said she had just the one to pull from her cookbook – one that was originally started by local elementary schoolers at the Cornucopia Project for their annual Harvest Supper.

The supper included three different soups made with locally grown ingredients, including a butternut squash soup.

The ingredients list was a collaborative effort by the children who first served it, and has since been refined, Schilling said.

“I asked the children, ‘What do you think we should put in?’ And one said ‘Carrots,” and it went from there,” Schilling said. “It all kind of evolved, and we made this soup.”

Schilling said she herself has refined the recipe over the years – it originally did not contain any wine, for example, she joked – and she’s adjusted the spices, but it is a collaborative recipe.

“It’s a fabulous recipe and it’s really the children’s recipe, with a little fine tuning,” Schilling said. The recipe is good for that kind of individualization, Schilling said.

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“This really will become your soup. If you want to add more tumeric, you go for it. If you want to add more ginger, you go for it,” Schilling advised.

Schilling said though she no longer lives in the area, her “heart is in Hancock” and the memories she made there. The best advice she could give, she said, was to put your emotion into your food.

“I cook with love. I don’t want this to sound hokey, but whatever I do, I want to be delicious and filled with gratitude, and if you do that there’s a total difference in the taste of the food,” Schilling said.

The next Zoom cooking class through the Hancock Town Library will be Cooking Pierogi with Marilyn Wyzga via Zoom on Dec. 5 at 1 p.m. Contact the Hancock Town Library for the Zoom link at 603-525-4411.

 

Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients: One large butternut squash, three medium size carrots, two medium size shallots, olive oil, four Tablespoons unsalted butter, three garlic cloves, one onion, one teaspoon of salt, two Tablespoons of freshly grated ginger, maple syrup, ½ teaspoon tumeric, 1 teaspoon of curry powder, ½ teaspoon of pepper, three cups of organic vegetable stock, ¾ cup of havy cream, one cup of white wine (chardonnay)

Instructions: Chop vegetables and drizzle with olive oil. Roast all the vegetables until soft for about 40 minutes in a 375 degree oven. Combine in a soup pot. Add all remaining ingredients and bring to a simmer. Do not boil. Puree. Serve in a warm bowl, topped with sour cream and garnished with parsley if you wish. Makes about half a gallon of soup.

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