Soup Kitchen

Butternut Squash Soup
1 Medium onion, diced
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
4 Tablespoons butter (more if feeling indulgent)
2 Butternut squash, cut in half longitudinally and de-seeded.
5-6 cups chicken broth (or water with boullion)
1 Tablespoon curry powder
Salt and pepper

Directions:
Roast squash: place, cut side down, on cookie sheet in 400 degree oven for 45 mins to an hour. Squash should be soft enough to scoop out of peel easily with a spoon.

While squash is roasting:
sautee onions and garlic in butter in large soup pot until onions are tender and garlic is fragrant.
Add Chicken broth and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add Squash to broth mixture and let simmer a couple of minutes; add curry powder.
Use an immersion blender (if you want to make this really easy) or transfer in batches to a blender/food processor to puree soup to right consistency.
Add salt and pepper to taste.

I served it with a dollop of yogurt and Turkish paprika. We also froze some and it tasted good when thawed.

Unexpected fact: Reagan loves butternut squash. He went crazy when he smelled it roasting in the kitchen and kept on coming in and whining for some squash! He was acting like the butternut squash was a T-bone steak or something. We gave him some of the leftover roasted squash, and of course I took a picture because I thought it was funny.

Stuff going on

For the last week I've been gone on interviews/ doing a grand tour of Texas. I was shocked when I checked my own blog and realized that I hadn't even put up Halloween pictures yet!
Ethan and I went as Eurotrash. He spoke with an accent all night but I wasn't able to because I couldn't stop laughing long enough to form words.



Last Tuesday we drove to Houston

where on Wednesday I interviewed at Methodist/St. Joseph. The program was nice but the interview day was extremely and extensively way too long (like 6:30-3:00) That night we drove to Austin and got this:

which bummed me out so we went to Santa Rita and drank some yummy margaritas and spent the night with my mom.
Thursday afternoon we drove up to Temple with enough time to make the pre-interview applicant welcome dinner. Our instructions were to meet the residents in the lobby of the hotel, at which point they would give us directions to dinner. We did that and drove 25 minutes from Temple to a restaurant on the lake in Belton. Once there, I noticed something odd; the menus on the table read "welcome Scott and White Emergency Medicine Applicants". I calmly pulled a resident aside and asked whether the menu was correct, which they indeed were. Turns out there were two groups meeting in the lobby at the same exact time, and we had chosen the wrong one. As it was going to be an entire hour after dinner was to have started by the time we got back to the hotel, we decided to just go get some tacos and beer and have a picnic in the hotel room with the company of the history channel. We also perused a Temple real estate guide, which had a house whose selling statement was actually "Kids and Horses welcome!" It was a bit like being in an alternate universe. The residents there were super nice though.
On Friday after the interview we drove back to Austin, napped, and then went to go see La Boheme with my mom, her boyfriend, my sister Erin, and my sister's friend from Spain Irene.

It was an awesome performance in the new Long Arts center. The set design and the voices were both fantastic.




Over the weekend we cooked and baked and relaxed and basked in the glory of my mom's extensive subscription to cable television (HBO on demand is the bomb). My Austin interview was Monday and it was fantastic. Ethan and I spent the afternoon trying to find fixer-uppers in town and we didn't want to come back to Dallas! I still have a few more interviews to go but I'm pretty excited about that possibility.

Things I've learned on the interview trail:
1. Cocktail party situations in which there are no cocktails are pretty awkward; I am therefore automatically biased towards places that will give me some kind of mild social lubricant during the interviewee welcome dinner
2. If an interview day is well-run, I assume the program will be fairly well organized. There was one place that skipped my interview and had me waiting in a room for three hours before I was called to speak with anyone.
3. I am also biased towards programs whose interviews begin at 8:00 or 8:30 rather than 7:00.
4. I don't really care what the hospitals look like unless I'm thinking about giving birth there myself. It just adds another hour or two onto the day to have to go on a tour.