Butternut Squash Soup

Today is a chilly, dreary day: perfect soup weather.  Plus, since it’s a Saturday, there was time enough to make a good one while doing some chores and watching the LSU game on the internet (no SEC football on my limited cable, unfortunately!).  I’d gotten a butternut squash on my last trip to the store for just such an occasion, and I have to admit that I was more than a little excited to use it.

Last summer, Josh and I actually grew (several!) butternut squash in our garden in Nashville, and we love using them in the fall.  They keep a really long time in the pantry, and since they’re also super-delicious and good for you, they’re a great garden item.  In case you’ve never had them, the flavor is somewhere between a sweet potato and a pumpkin.  So, between their tastiness, health benefits and general economy, I’d have to rank butternut squash as one of my absolute favorite fall vegetables (even though, technically, it’s not a vegetable at all).

Though I was looking forward to making a butternut squash soup, I actually wasn’t quite sure what I would do, recipe-wise.  I’ve recently fallen into watching a Canadian cooking show called “It’s Just Food,” which is great for getting basic ideas; their butternut squash soup used carrots, garlic, onion, green apples, and a dash of maple syrup, but I had no apples or syrup, and wasn’t quite sure that I wanted my soup to be sweet at all.  All too often I believe people make the mistake of thinking that if they’re using fall vegetables with fall-esque spices, everything needs to come out tasting like pumpkin pie, which becomes overwhelmingly cloying really quickly.  But enough of my soap-box.

I decided to do my own thing–inspired by, but not directly derivative of, the “It’s Just Food” recipe.  I did follow their tip of doing a preliminary browning of the chunks of squash and carrots and yellow onion (the carmelization brings out just enough sweetness for me), butI used potatoes instead of apples.  After these got a bit of color, I added several cups of vegetable stock and a few cloves of garlic.  Before letting this boil away, I went to town with the spices–which, by the way, is my favorite part of the cooking process.  This time, since I was really just winging it, I added quite a bit.  What ended up being most prominent, though were the following: ginger, coriander, cayenne and dried chipotles (as I mentioned earlier, these give the smokiness of bacon flavor to vegetarian foods), plus a pinch of cinnamon, nutmeg and sage.  After everything simmered together for about half an hour and the vegetables were all tender, I hit the whole thing with my immersion blender till it was pureed.  Things were pretty thick at that point, so I decided to finish the entire thing with a bit of milk, which toned down some of the heat and made the finished soup really rich and creamy.  In the end, I was super happy with how it turned out–warm, spicy and savory, with just a hint of sweetness–and maybe just a little too proud of myself for coming up with something so great on my own.  I’m hoping the LSU game turns out so well!