Roasted Vegetable Soup and Dessert with Strawberries

Canada is getting chillier by the day, reminding me that summer is no longer with us. Pat, in serious denial, is off camping and canoeing this weekend leaving me to post this week.

A few weeks ago I made roasted vegetable soup with bacon. I always thought that making soups that weren't made by throwing stuff into boiling water would be complicated and not worth the effort. Not so. Happily I was enlightened by Helen Dujardin of Tartelette. Her blog always has such sumptuous photos, that before I know it I find myself delving into the recipe. (and I'm a sucker for beautiful photos!) Over the past year since I discovered her blog I've used vegetables I've never heard of and tried out recipes that I never would have thought to. Plus--this is the important part--everything I've made from her blog has been delicious. Not just your average "yeah that was a good meal" delicious, but the "I can't afford to leave leftovers at all" kind of delicious.

Although I won't elaborate on the recipe since it can be found here, it really is much simpler than it appears. Basically the steps are: cut up vegetables, throw in oven, and blend. We don't have a food processor so I used the "Magic Bullet Blender" that we received second hand when we moved to Canada.

One thing is that I think our oven is slightly weaker than average, and the vegetables didn't roast up as crisply as they should have. It still made for a delicious soup, but next time I'll try a higher temperature. I also should have added more garlic.

The resulting soup was very rich despite being solely vegetable and water (plus a garnish of sizzling bacon)

For those local farmer's market enthusiasts looking for a more fall flavored soup, I highly recommend her butternut and acorn squash soup, which is equally gratifying, if not more so.

Now, since Pat was going to be away, I needed a treat to keep me placated while he was gone, and decided to make desserts with some juicy local strawberries that for some reason were still sold this late in September. I wanted something creamy and sweet to compliment the tart berries, and settled on panna cotta and zabaglione gelato.

Tartelette's panna cotta has such a high decadence:ease of preparation ratio that I've made it at least four times already in the past year. I usually make the caramelized pear that goes ridiculously well with it (I'm not that fond of pear, but the delicious taste of rich brown sugar matches the creamy yet refreshing panna cotta, and the pear left slightly juicy adds the perfect bite to the otherwise smooth dessert), but this time I added sugared strawberries instead.

The reason that I made two desserts instead of one was that I bought a litre of cream and didn't want it to go to waste. Pat argues that I could have just bought a 500ml carton instead, but I wave aside such silliness. More dessert is never a bad thing. The gelato is another selection from David Lebovitz's  "The Perfect Scoop", and is so far my favorite recipe I've tried from his book. According to Lebovitz, his gelato based on zabaglione, "a foamy custard of egg yolks, wine, and sugar", "captures the taste of true zabaglione in a cool scoop of ice cream without the last minute flurry of activity, and it's just as good served with lots of juicy strawberries." With the strawberry season ending, I had to try it now.

I didn't have the Marsala wine the recipe called for, so I did some googling and substituted it with dry white wine with a dash of brandy. The result--heavenly. I don't know whether it was the alcohol content resisting the freezing process, but the result was a consistently scoopable gelato that starts off in your mouth with cool custard balanced with the dry aroma of wine, then gradually melts into the rich sweetness of brandy. This scooped onto strawberries is just so, so.... I can't even describe it in words.

So all in all, set with the two desserts cooling away in the fridge/freezer, I survived the weekend, and thinking back I have the feeling that Pat going away was really just an excuse to make an unnecessary amount of yummy treats. I should have made them when Pat was here so he could have shared in the joy, you say? ....maybe, I'll think about it next time. But for now, more for me to devour. Mwahahaha.