Countertransference Squash Soup

Our new housemate, Liz, is a grad student in counseling psychology. She provides this recipe for a thick and creamy soup that will help you begin to explore your unconscious reactions toward farm share vegetables, particularly those that may be limiting your objectivity when it comes to cooking them.

Start with some squash -- we had two delicata and two acorn -- and bake them well. While they bake, consider your life history, particularly your anxieties vis-a-vis squash. (Editor's note: I am a bit anxious that Liz may be cloaking the fact she doesn't remember what went into the soup in psychological jargon.)

Meanwhile, in a soup pot, cook diced potatoes, carrot, onion, possibly celery or other sturdy vegetables, and seasonings in oil, until vegetables are almost completely cooked. (Liz seasoned with salt, rosemary, sage, and an accidentally generous measure of pepper. Add pepper just past the point where the top of the pepper container falls off for a delightfully spicy soup.)

The potatoes may require therapy at this point if they are cooking slowly. You can add about a cup of water, cover the pot, and raise the temperature until the potatoes are forced to reflect on their life choices. (Less technically: "It's not warm enough if they are cooking in a mellow way in which they are just grooving along.")

Add peppers, scallions, and other delicate vegetables at this point. Be conscious of transference relationships between the potatoes and everything else. Cook until all the vegetables are almost completely cooked.

Then lop in the squash and mix it around a little in the soup.

Pour in some milk -- a lot of milk -- until you feel self-actualized (the soup will be thick). Reseason to taste. Liz added brown sugar (according to relational frame theory, squash soup should be sweet) and salt. You could also add greens -- we used kale -- at this point.

If the squash is not mooshed enough -- and Liz assures me that this is the psychological term -- you can use an immersion blender (which Freud codified as "the blender-on-a-stick phenomenon") in the bottom two inches of the pot.

We served the soup with the same biscuits we had with our pot pie. Our housemate Jack asserts that the biscuits are essential and are ideally eaten crumbled into the soup, but he has no formal training in psychotherapy so far as I can tell.