The recipe in question was “Jimmy Ray’s Butternut Poblano Soup”.  Among the spices used were both chili powder and cinnamon, so right there I was intrigued.  For the longest time I was pretty sure that cinnamon only went in my morning oatmeal or apple pie.  Anything else was just weird.  And then I discovered Mollie Katzen, who is my hands down favorite cookbook author, and some of her interesting uses of cinnamon.  I still am not brave enough to throw it anything on my own, but any recipe that calls for it, I’m game.

See?  It must be good.

The cookbook is from a resturant in Athens, Georgia, by the name of The Grit.  The recipe is a vegan one, and while I’ve got nothing against vegan, I wasn’t in the mood to go to the store for soymilk.  So I used real dairy in the form of milk & butter, instead of soy versions.  I think cream would be outstanding in this soup, but I was fresh out.  I may actually be slightly over cream at this point in my life, having just gotten through the holiday season, heavy on the cream.   There was still a nice richness to the soup, even with skim milk, but that may have been the smidgen of chicken broth I used, as I was also fresh out of vegetable broth.  (I realize that those changes took this lovely soup about as far away from vegan as possible and honestly, I don’t mind vegan, we do eat that way at times, but I’m also the girl who fries her tofu in bacon fat.)

I made a few other changes to the recipe, mostly to fit what I had on hand.  So, instead of buying and roasting poblanos, I just pulled some of the anaheim peppers I grew, roasted, chopped and froze last summer out of the freezer.  Fresh herbs were used for the parsley and rosemary, in place of dried, which is what the recipe called for.  I may have used too much parsley – I went out and cut some from the garden as it was getting dark and I didn’t realize until I started chopping how much I had.  Oh well.  There are worse things than too much parsley in your soup.  It may have covered up for the fact that I didn’t take the seeds out of my hot peppers, as the recipe called for and they ended up in there as well.  While I’m confessing all the changes I made, I’ll go ahead and say that when I froze the chopped peppers, I filled jars, so there was no measuring ‘one to two’ peppers.  I just eyeballed it and threw in what I felt was a good amount.