Waking up to butternut squash soup

Slow cookers are fabulous. Last night I went to sleep having thrown in some half-cooked squash, chicken stock and some herbs, and this morning I woke up to the most amazing smells. I'm not saying that it made getting out of bed any easier, but it certainly made ignoring my alarm clock that much better.

There's also a really fun story behind this particular batch of soup, so what better place for it to be recorded than here?

I meant to make the soup over the weekend. That didn't happen, in part because I didn't go grocery shopping until 10:30 on Sunday night, and also because when I did go shopping, the grocery store didn't have any fresh rosemary or thyme. I even asked someone for help looking for them, and got the usual box-store reply of, "oh, there isn't any on the shelf. I guess we don't have that right now."

So I'm thinking, no biggie, I don't have time to make the soup tonight anyway, so I'll go to the organic food store/juice bar down the street and get some on my way out in the morning. They've got to have tons of herbs. I can make the soup when I get home and have it Monday night for dinner. Well they didn't have much to speak of for herbs and also didn't have any rosemary or thyme.

At this point I'm thinking about sacrificing my tea-ball and just settling for using dried herbs, but it didn't make me happy. (Postscript: get herb ball.)

I continued on to Northwestern where I had an AV orientation in a classroom that I'm going to be teaching in this quarter. Actually, I'm not teaching in there anymore; they switched my room right after my orientation. But anyway, this really nice lady was there to do my orientation, and when I opened my laptop to see if I could get it to connect to the system, there was the butternut squash recipe up on my screen. The AV guru, Natalie, said, "oh, that looks good," and so I replied, "yeah, it's a friend of mine's recipe (it's Chris Towle's). I can email it to you if you'd like." I mentioned that I was going to make it that evening, but that I'd been to two stores and couldn't find any rosemary or thyme, to which Natalie responded that she had some in her garden and I could stop by after work and get some if I wanted to.

So that's exactly what I ended up doing. She met up with me by the L and her boyfriend John picked us both up. I got the quick tour of their apartment, which is really very charming and looks like one of the pseudo-rustic stucco houses that I saw in Germany, and I met their parakeet, Ella, who used to be a lab bird and is going on close to ten years old. Natalie and I went and clipped some herbs and then she gave me a ride back to the L. So not only do I have really fabulous smells to wake up to this morning, but I also made I new friend! Her boyfriend likes to play bridge, so I am going to try to learn. I also might bring over my dominoes and teach them how to play.