So, you don’t want to know what I had for lunch, eh? How about dinner? You think you don’t, but believe me, you do.

But first, let me tell you about the sweet potato-peanut soup. If you are fortunate enough not to have a peanut allergy, this is such an easy and delicious soup to add to your repertoire. I’d love to give you the recipe, but I should probably refrain from any infringement of copyright.

However, just supposing that you were to find yourself in possession of a couple or three good-sized sweet potatoes (or maybe two of those mega-potatoes), a respectable onion, some brown sugar, garlic (do you really need to know how much? I always put in extra as insurance anyway), peanutbutter, cilantro, and some spices (say, coriander and cayenne pepper, and of course salt), then, I’m just saying, you could make a soup quite similar to this one.

Imagine you had some butter, about two tablespoons worth, and you applied heat to this butter in a large pan not unlike a dutch oven. Having chopped your onion, you might feel inclined to saute it, with a teaspoon of brown sugar and one of salt, for about 5 minutes. Oh, what have I here? You say. Garlic, coriander (half tsp) and a wee bit of cayenne. Perfect. I think I’ll cook these in my pan until they are aromatic. 30 seconds later, you might be inspired to add broth (3 to 4 cups — I forgot about that, but I use veggie stock for this), thinly sliced sweet potates, 3 TB peanutbutter, and 2 cups water.

Once you’ve gone that far, you may as well get it boiling, reduce heat, partially cover and cook until you can easily make your sweet potatoes into sweet potato fragments with the implement of your choice.

Here is the part where you would theoretically be so totally psyched if you should happen to have an immersion blender, because all you have to do is blend it in the pan, add S&P to taste, and mix in cilantro at the end. If you don’t you would need to remove it from the pan for blending. So slightly less easy, but not too bad. You will end up with a delicious and beautiful silky smooth orange soup.

If that is too complicated, I would now like to tell you about my nominee for the food with the best ratio of ease to deliciousness. This is actually part of a recipe for udon noodles with ginger squash in a miso broth, which is in fact what I made for dinner. However, the ginger squash is so good it is worth making all by itself.

What you need:
Winter squash such as butternut or buttercup or kabocha, ginger root, oil and salt.
Preheat oven to 375
Peel and slice squash into approximately half-inch thick slices.
Mince 1 tablespoon of ginger
Mix squash, ginger, 1/2 tsp salt, and about 1 tablespoon of oil (or whatever looks good).
Spread in a parchment lined baking dish and bake until squash is tender. It usually takes 20 – 30 minutes and I usually mix it around in the pan part way through. I like it when it gets just a little bit brown and crisp around the edges.

It’s so tasty you’ll eat it like m&m’s.