Soup to conquer

As the preeminent cooking day of the year approaches, thoughts — and high anxiety — inevitably turn to the star attraction, the turkey. But wait. Hold those thoughts and focus instead on creating a stellar starter that could easily distinguish your Thanksgiving Day meal from the truly ordinary and mundane.

Sure, everyone expects the customary stuffing, potatoes and cranberry sauce, but why not begin the meal with a comforting, silken bisque that takes advantage of the plentiful squash in markets this time of year? Swirl in a little browned butter and accent your soup with a dollop of crème fraîche and toasted pumpkin seeds, and you’ll have yourself a crowd pleaser that will comfortably ease your guests’ way into the heavier platters of food that await them.

While Thanksgiving is a wonderful excuse to catch the soup-making fever, the chill of fall and winter provide easy inspiration for transforming any medley of vegetables, herbs and broth into a side dish or main course worthy of a restaurant chef’s creation.

Carl Schroeder, owner of the highly regarded Market Restaurant in Del Mar, is so enamored with soups that he personally oversees the preparation of them rather than delegate the task to a sous chef or line cook.

“For Thanksgiving, I think soup is such a great lead-in, the steam coming off it, the way the smell fills the room, the ritual of eating the soup,” said Schroeder, his voice growing more rapturous as he envisions a Thai-style concoction of curried kabocha squash, enhanced with a lemon grass stalk broth, garlic, shallots, ginger, green onion and coconut milk. “Everyone gets a kabocha soup facial as they’re leaning over the bowl.

“There are so many flavors blended together I can take all those flavors and create exactly the mood I’d like.”

Cookbook author Anna Thomas, known best for her groundbreaking vegetarian tome of the 1970s, “Vegetarian Epicure,” and now out with a book devoted to soup-making, loves the idea of beginning the Thanksgiving supper with a steaming bowl of richly flavored soup.