If it sort of seems from my recent postings that all I eat these days is soup, well, it’s not very far from the truth. But see, all those winter vegetables are really begging for it, and I don’t have the heart to turn them down. Besides, since I am now equipped with a cast-iron cocotte and an immersion blender, it’s only courteous of me to use them, right?

Today’s featured soup was made with a large chunk of butternut squash bought at the farmers’ market on Saturday morning. My favorite produce stall (when you come out of the Rome metro station and walk through the market, it is the penultimate stand on your right, with a pretty salesgirl and an older bearded man who gives clementines to children) had impressive specimens, chubby at the base with two-feet-long necks curled like a swan’s. I recoiled at first, never having bought such a huge vegetable before, but the salesgirl explained that they sold them in smaller sections if desired, which felt more manageable: I bought about a third of one, which still weighed in at two kilos.

Back home, I started cutting and peeling the squash, which is always a bit of a pain one has to admit, but not so bad if you’re listening to Jack Johnson on the stereo. I softened some onions, added in the squash, poured in water to cover (I seldom have stock on hand, sue me), and brought the soup to a simmer. I then surveyed my unabashedly disorganized spice rack — a simple ledge running the length of the counter — in search of something to spike up the soup. Cumin, pimentón, ginger maybe?

But no. All these possibilities were brushed aside when I spotted the smoked glass jar of vanilla paste (which my friend Alisa kindly brought back to me from Trader-Joe-land) and I decided to use that instead, to very pleasing results: vanilla complemented the sweetness of the squash beautifully, adding nuance and a supple kick to it. It would be a good idea to make the soup a day ahead (or make sure you have leftovers) because the vanilla aromas had blossomed more fully the next day.

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I’ve noticed that my cooking is most often vegetable-driven: I will buy fresh veggies at the market or at the produce stall, and then decide what fish or meat will complement them — not the other way around.

On Saturday morning I returned from the farmers’ market with a basket of mostly root vegetables, not such a surprise in December: tiny spuds with a skin so thin you feel they should wear chapstick, young carrots with a wild tuft of bright green hair, and parsley roots, which were a novelty to me. They are called persil tubéreux in French, they look and taste somewhat like parsnips, and their small and flat leaves are a very tasty parsley that resists frost. Just like parsnips, they belong to the family of “forgotten vegetables” that were once very common but have fallen out of fashion — because they’re too vividly associated with war food, difficult to cultivate and prepare, or simply not very palatable to the modern eater.

Once this trio of root vegetables was neatly put to bed in their fridge drawer, it occurred to me that they would be lovely in a simple beef stew, slowly cooked so the different flavors would have time to meld. The next morning I paid a visit to my butcher Mario, asked for advice regarding the cut — I am not a very experienced stew maker — and got the jumeau he recommended, a tender cut taken from the upper part of the front leg. Mario’s wife then weighed it on an ancient mechanical scale because their electronic one had just broken down and it was Sunday so the repairman was unavailable.

This was the perfect dish to make on an ice-cold Sunday afternoon: around five I started peeling the vegetables, set the stew to simmer over low heat, and went about the house doing other things, intermittently coming back to check on it, breathe in the warm smells and get my glasses all steamed up. It was also the perfect dish to eat on a similarly ice-cold Sunday night, warm and comforting, with soft textures and sweet aromatic notes.

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[Pink Praline Chocolate Cake]

Pralines can be a confusing thing, considering that the same pretty word (It would make a cool name for a little girl, no? Or would this ruin her life you think?) is used for different confections.

The original praline is made by cooking almonds in melted sugar: the mixture is left to cool then reheated several times, forming an irregular crust of crispy chewy caramel around the tender almond. These pralines are usually golden brown and thus referred to as pralines brunes, but a coloring can be added to the sugar and then all bets are off. But praline is also the name given to Belgian chocolate bites with a smooth filling, sometimes made with pralin (a mixture of grilled almonds and cooked sugar, or ground brown pralines) and, this has to be said, often too cloying for my taste — I am a ganache girl at heart.

And then there is the pink praline. Often featured in specialties from Lyon, the pink praline could look to the untrained eye like a brown praline in pink clothing: it is an almond in sugar after all. But there is in fact one capital difference here: the sugar surrounding the almond is not caramelized. This gives the pink praline a unique kind of texture, quite different from the brown praline’s sweet stickiness: your teeth meet a slight resistance at first, but the powdery sugar coating quickly surrenders, crumbling in little flakes on your tongue, while you start chewing on the meaty almond.

Like anything pink and edible, this praline benefits from my unconditional adhesion. It is a fine candy to eat out of hand (particularly with coffee), but it can also be used as an ingredient in baking or cooking recipes: tarte aux pralines roses (a great classic, not unlike a pecan pie — recipe here), île flottante aux pralines roses (as tasted at Aux Lyonnais), brioche aux pralines roses (such as Pralus‘ famous Praluline), or a delicious magret de canard aux pralines roses (as tasted at the Café Fusion). Even Heston Blumenthal has featured pink praline tarlets in his tasting menu, that has to tell you something. The pink praline is like a magic wand, lending color and flavor and a tickling name to anything you choose to make — I’m sure even a pink praline meatloaf would be irresistible, but let me test that recipe first and I’ll get back to you.

G. Detou sells pink pralines in bulk, whole or pre-crushed (convenient and cheaper), and I had bought a bag of the latter a few months ago with the firm intention of making a tarte aux pralines roses. That tart hasn’t happened yet, but some of the pralines were put to good use in this pink praline chocolate cake, which I baked for my sister’s birthday party a few days ago. I had made her a chocolate and pistachio cake for her previous birthday, and since a chocolate cake is always well received, I decided to make yet another adaptation of my favorite coffeecake, moist and fluffy, using cacao powder, chocolate chips, and a good sprinkle of pink pralines on top. And who knows, maybe these two cakes — one green, one pink — are the first in a series of chocolate cakes using a different color of ingredient every year?

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[Swiss Chard and Parsnip Soup]

… a.k.a. the smoothest soup to ever be born on my stove. Yes: after months of coveting and weighing and dreaming and stealthily searching eBay, I finally caved in and treated myself to my very first immersion blender. I am slowly taking in what that means — onions and herbs chopped in a pinch, banana milkshakes, velvety soups and most importantly, stiff egg whites without the forearm cramps — and I could just clap my hands in happy anticipation if you weren’t looking.

The first thing I used the new toy for was this soup (actually that’s not true, I first used it to turn a piece of stale bread into breadcrumbs but I figured that wasn’t quite post-worthy). These days, the inspiration for most of the soups I make comes from just walking to the produce stall, choosing two vegetables that look healthy and well-behaved, then celebrating their marriage hastily with a very small crowd (just two witnesses, onions and garlic) in my cast-iron chapel.

It’s very difficult to go wrong with the pairing of just two vegetables — particularly if they’re in season at the same time — and this soup was no exception: complementary flavors (“Green and slightly bitter”, said the chard. “Starchy and subtly sweet”, replied the parsnip.) and a unique textural understanding between the two, never-before witnessed in my kitchen until the magic blender entered it, with its shiny, immaculate cape and its faithful following of fancy little accessories.

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