I had never seen a butternut squash before a couple of weeks ago. So when a neighbor gave us a few of them my initial thought was what am I going to do with this? I decided to make good use of this gift by looking it up online. I could not believe all of the recipes I found using this squash! Butternut Squash Soup by far sounded the best, so I made some. I did quite a bit of tweaking of the recipe to fit what I thought sounded good and it turned out pretty amazing.
Everyone loved it, even Little O who won't eat a vegetable for anything.
Want to see how simple it is? I thought you'd never ask!
By the way, this makes an enormous pot of soup.
First of all you halve two good sized butternut squash and scoop out all of the seeds and gunk.
Set each of the four halves on baking sheets,
cover them with foil and bake them at 350 degrees for about an hour (until the squash is soft).
While the squash is cooking, make the broth mixture. Dice up an onion.
Melt the butter (this butter is so happy to be a part of such tasty soup!)
in a large pot, then add onion and sautee until the onion is tender.
Next you'll add the chicken broth. The kind I bought (at the Dollar Store!) came in a package marked as 'four one cup servings', so I just dumped in one whole container
then measured out the rest of what I needed from another container.
Measure out the marjoram, black pepper and cayenne pepper
and add them to the broth.
(It's a tiny amount of cayenne but it gives it a tiny bit of kick that someone like me, who doesn't like anything spicy, could appreciate. If you like spicy stuff you may want to add more.)
Bring it all to a boil then turn off the burner and cover the pot until the squash is done.
Scoop the squash out of its shell with a spoon.
Here's the total amount of squash-meat I scraped from the 4 halves:
For the next step, I dumped all of the broth into a pitcher so it would be easier to add to the squash in the blender.
Puree portions of the squash with some of the broth and some of the whipping cream (just eyeball it. It's all going to end up in the soup, anyway).
(Side note: It adds some texture to the soup if you don't blend up all of the onions. Just remove them from the broth with a slotted spoon and return them to the pot. We've tried it both ways and prefer a few chunks of onion throughout the soup.)
Return the pureed goodness to the pot and heat everything through. (Don't let it boil.)
Serve it up with some sour cream (optional) and crusty bread. (Also optional. But why wouldn't you?)(It's easy to make the sour cream look fancy as in the picture at the top of this post. Just scoop some into a sandwich baggie
and snip a tiny corner off then squeeze it onto the soup in whatever cool pattern you like.)This is the perfect fall/winter soup. Delish!
Butternut Squash Soup
- 1 onion, chopped
- ½ cup (1 stick) butter
- 2 large butternut squash
- 6+ cups chicken broth
- 3/4 teaspoon dried marjoram
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
- 1/2 pint whipping cream
2. While squash is cooking, saute onions in butter in a large pot until tender. Add chicken broth, marjoram, black pepper and cayenne pepper. Bring to a boil then turn off the burner and cover the pot until the squash is done.
3. Puree squash, broth and whipping cream in a blender in batches until smooth. Return pureed goodness to the pot and heat everything through. (Do not let it boil.) If it seems too thick, add a little more chicken broth to the pureed mixture.
4. Top with sour cream if that sounds good to you, then serve it up with some crusty sourdough bread or homemade rolls.
