Vegan with a Vengeance

and chopping.

Roasted Butternut Squash Soup
    SERVES 6
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    Roasting the squash intensifies its sweetness but be careful not to eat it all before you have a chance to make the soup. The ingredients here are simple yet the results are scrumptious.
    5 pounds butternut squash (about 3), peeled, bulbous part cut from the stem part, then each part sliced in half, seeds removed
    4 tablespoons olive oil
    1 medium-size yellow onion, diced
    1 serrano chile, chopped (any chile will do, or you can omit if you don’t want it spicy at all)
    1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
    3 cloves garlic, minced
    1 teaspoon salt (or more to taste)
    4 cups vegetable stock, or 2 cubes vegetable bouillon dissolved in 4 cups water
    1 tablespoon maple syrup
    Juice of 1 or 2 limes, to taste
    Preheat oven to 425°F.
    Lightly coat the squash halves with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and place cut side down on a nonstick or parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet (if you don’t have a rimmed baking sheet then use baking pans, to prevent the oil from dripping and starting a grease fire). Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until the squash is tender and easily pierced with a fork.
    When the squash is about 15 minutes from being done, in a stockpot over medium heat sauté the onions in the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil for 5 minutes. Add the chiles; sauté 5 minutes more. Lastly, add the ginger, garlic, and salt; sauté 2 minutes more.
    When squash is ready, puree in a blender or food processor along with the vegetable broth and sautéed onion, until smooth. Return the mixture to the pot and heat through, add the maple syrup and lime juice, and serve.

    PUNK POINTS
    My top-secret technique for prepping a butternut squash: First, peel the whole thing with a serrated peeler, if you have one-it does a good job of slicing off the hard skin. Cut the squash in half widthwise, separating the bulbous part from the long part. Place the bulbous part cut-side down and slice it in half, then use a tablespoon to remove the seeds and the stringy bits. You should then be able to cut the squash into smaller pieces. Next, slice the long part of the squash in half and then cut into whatever size pieces you need. All too often I watch people struggle with this gourd, trying to cut it in half in one fell swoop and then peel it. I hope this has cleared things up for those of you who don’t like cooking butternut squash because it’s too difficult (I’m talkin’ to you, Mom).

    Food Not Bombs
    Food Not Bombs is a loosely knit network of activists that get together on a regular basis to cook food and feed people. Groups exist all across the world. Much more than Meals on Wheels, it’s a social movement that has been growing since 1980.
    In the late ’80s and early ’90s, a group of us would get together on Sundays and go from store to store gathering food donations. In many cases, it was food that would otherwise have been discarded—blemished vegetables from the greengrocers or day-old bagels from the bagel shops. We’d haul everything over to Lucky 13—a squat on 13th Street that had been around forever and was cool enough to host punk shows and let strangers use their kitchen—in a shopping cart “donated” by the local Key Food. There we would concoct hearty vats of vegetarian soup over a few hot plates, using water we tapped from the fire hydrant down the block (I’m not kidding).
    When the soups were done, everything would be piled back into the shopping cart and rolled a few blocks to Tompkins Square Park. The crowd we fed was diverse: yippies, homeless, junkies, psychopaths, artists, squatters, punks, and some combinations of the above. This was during the time of the Tompkins Square Park riots; activists were fighting to keep a curfew off the park and a shantytown called Tent City was set up on the lawn as a home for dozens of people. It was a rather dystopian scene. Cops milled about, and it was anyone’s guess as to whether they would decide to arrest us on a given evening. Despite these drawbacks, conversation was always lively and the food was always appreciated.
    One of the greatest things about Food Not Bombs was that you could go to virtually any city and get involved. The experience was always different from place to place. In San Francisco I was shocked to see how organized they were. They had a van! They had folding tables and a banner! In Berkeley they cooked in a college dorm and