Week 18 FInalists: Best Autumn Vegetable Puree Contest

Photo Slideshows

Autumn Celeriac Puree

A lovely change of pace from simple mashed potatoes, this puree sings with bright, clean flavors. The celery root and apple both contribute tartness (there's even a mysterious lemony element, although no lemon is used), while the potato smoothes out any rough edges. Cream and butter make the puree luscious, so that it feels like a treat rather than a just a healthy dose of veggies. Sonali takes care with her recipe writing, adding a couple of crucial steps that really make a difference. First, instead of calling for cream and butter on their own, she has you infuse them with a bay leaf, which subtly perfumes the puree. Then, she tells you to dry out the cooked veggies over a low flame before adding the cream mixture so that the puree is thick and luscious instead of insipid and watery. Assuming that Sonali assumed we would know to do this, we peeled the potato and celeriac before chopping them. - A&M

Although the recipe didn't specify to peel the celeriac and potatoes, we went ahead and did it anyway. First, you remove the flat end of the celeriac...

...and then cut away the creepy things that look like fingers. After that, it's smooth sailing with a peeler.

We measured out the cream, butter, and added the bay leaf, and put them on to warm fairly early, allowing the bay to really infuse the dairy.

The celeriac floats!

Halfway through cooking the vegetables, you add the apples. At one point, during the filming of this recipe, Amanda looked over and freaked out that we'd grossly overcooked the celery root, as it looked so "bloated." Yeah, it was the apple. She pays a lot of attention.

After the celeriac, apple, and potato are cooked and drained, Sonali instructs you to put them back on the stove and dry them over low heat for a couple of minutes. This is a great way to remove excess liquid from potentially waterlogged vegetables. It also works really well with plain old mashed potatoes.

Aww. Teamwork.

Purees scream for a heavy hand with the salt and pepper.

Roasted Butternut Squash Coconut Curry Puree

Roasted Butternut Squash Coconut Curry Puree by testkitchenette

This is butternut squash puree meets Southeast Asian flavors. It's mellow and creamy with warm spices and ginger. Testkitchenette points out that this puree can also be a soup if you thin it with broth -- we wholeheartedly agree. We loved this puree's versatility. We can imagine making it as part of an Indian meal as easily as we could see it on our Thanksgiving table with turkey. Testkitchenette has you cube the roasted squash before adding it to the pot with the coconut broth. We found that it's so soft, it's easier just to scoop out the squash in spoonfuls. It all gets pureed in the end, anyway, so it's an ideal recipe for those who hate precise chopping! - A&M

Baking the squash flesh side down steams it from the inside, and roasts the outer edges.

Amanda peeled the ginger with a peeler, but for those of us that don't like to dirty yet another tool, the edge of a spoon works just fine.

Softening the vegetables very slowly, so as not to color them.

Once you add the curry paste, be sure to break it up with the back of a wooden spoon.

Usually when A&M go head to head in a task involving knives, Merrill totally kills Amanda. On squash? Not so. Amanda shamed her in the peeling and cutting portion of the competition day.

After returning the squash to the blender, we mashed it a bit, and brought it back to a simmer. The (ultimately gorgeous) puree was slightly less than photogenic, but if you persevere through the mashing, you won't be disappointed!

Finally, the food processor. Amanda likes to live fast and loose with the level of liquid in her machine. Some argue that risk taking is a sign of insanity. Just saying.

Though the directions say to serve with cilantro (and we did), it was just so perfect without it, that we had to photograph it this way.