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Fall starting, anyone?

© Chris Knight

Hello everyone, and welcome to this month’s A Chef’s Kitchen! I hope that you all enjoyed last months feature about smoking food, I realize that I didn’t place any recipes up for review about that, so let me include a quick one here that we ran this last week as a special. Smoked Trout with Amoretto Buerre Blanc. If you like fish in general, and especially if you like trout, you will enjoy this one.

Now that the weather has finally turned a little and it’s not 900 degrees everyday, we can start thinking about some more fall weather type dishes. I have to admit, my favorite time of year to cook is the winter because of the baking and the spices and the entertaining, but the fall offers some interesting ingredients to be used. Being from the northeast, I usually associate apples, nuts, and other types of food like that to be fall dishes, so I will include something along those lines here this month. Since this is only the very beginning of the fall season, you can expect a couple of months of this sort of menu discussion, the topic of each month being fall type items.

There are many different types of fall foods. Since things have changed so much the past 30 years or so, it’s not like it used to be anymore concerning the availability of ingredients. In the past, you could only get certain ingredients at certain times of the year. This, of course, is where the idea of seasonal food items come from. I suppose it seems obvious, but many people don’t know that the reason more apple desserts come later in the year is that when people relied on the seasons to bring them the ingredients, the fall was when the apples were ready to be used. The same goes with many other seasonal dishes.

This month, I will discuss a soup, entrée, and a dessert, as well as the smoked trout dish. For the soup, I thought that I would start with something that is a typical fall dish. One ingredient that I think of when I think of fall is squash. In this soup, Butternut Squash Bisque , the main ingredient as you can read is butternut squash. You should have no problem whatsoever finding butternut squash in the store in the coming months, and another appealing aspect of squash is that it is very reasonably priced. For this recipe, I recommend having some sort of food processor, if not one of the “wand” types, the types that you can place into the pan itself rather than dumping the food into it. If you don’t have either type, you can still prepare the dish no problem, but it will just be a lumpier type soup rather than the creamy style bisque.