All winter long, I love to make soup. Heck, I eat it in the summer, too! You get all the veggies as you do from a salad, but there’s no temptation to add high fat nastiness (I love blue cheese and almonds on my salad).
Soup can be easy to make but it does take a little planning. Here’s my recipe for Butternut Squash Soup. It is beyond simple, but requires two tools to make it super easy:
A really good peeler.
I use this one:
Messermeister Serrated Peeler
I got it from Sur La Table, but mine is just plain black… who knew it comes in pretty colors?
It is what you need if you want to peel your squash, and I do! I find it much easier to make squash stuff if you peel it before cooking. Lots of folks out there like to bake it and then take the peel off, but I find it hard to get the peel off that way.
An immersion blender.
I use this one, but don’t have any particular affection for it other than it works:
Cuisinart Immersion Blender
If you are going to make any creamed soup, an immersion blender is your friend. You may have a regular blender, but this is worlds better. No spooning hot soup (because who waits to cool it down) into a blender, blending it and getting hot soup sprayed everywhere because who remembers not to fill it up too much? and then repeating the process over and over until you get the whole batch done.
So, with those tools, I give to you my:
Butternut Squash Soup
Ingredients
Onions (yellow or white. Red would look funny) quantity: how much do you like onions?
1 tsp Olive oil (optional)
Butternut squash (one, two… depending how big they are)
Water
Apple juice (optional)
Salt (optional)
Fresh Sage
Chop the onion and saute under medium heat in a biggish pot until soft (I sometimes skip the sauteing if I’m using my crock pot).
Peel the squash. Cut open and remove the seeds. Cut into chunks; smaller cook faster, bigger are faster to cut.
Put the squash in the biggish pot with the onions and add water to cover. You can add apple juice if you like your soup a bit sweeter, and salt if you like. If you don’t, it counts as a weight watchers Filling Food/core food.
Cook on high until boiling, then turn down to a simmer. Cook until the squash is mushy, about 30 minutes.
Add several leaves of the fresh sage, and continue cooking for 10 more minutes. How much sage? How much do you like sage? I like it a lot, so I put in 10-15 leaves in, about half of a package.
Remove from heat and let cool 5 minutes. Use the immersion blender to turn the chunks of squash and onion into creamy soup. Add more water if it looks more like baby food than soup.
Voila! Lots and lots of butternut squash soup. It freezes well, though the visual appearance gets a little odd… looks stringy, almost. Ignore it and eat it, as the texture and taste will be the same.
I usually get 16 cups of soup out of this recipe.
