Creamy Butternut Squash Soup With Thyme & Rosemary

Dec 15, 2013 | Food-Shui

Creamy soups that are piping hot and lusciously farm-fresh are my favorite in the winter. Here’s my conundrum (and maybe yours in some way, too) : I adore squash, and yet I can’t eat anything made with cream or commercial stock of any kind, so a soup that I can eat that is 100% pure and free of dairy and processed food is very laborious under normal circumstances. Until now!

When my sister first made this soup, I couldn’t stop eating it. It has layers of flavor that usually only come from vegetable stock and the creaminess of actual cream, but its all veggies & squash with herbs.

Creamy Butternut Squash Soup With Thyme & Rosemary

2 small butternut squashes, peeled and cubed. If you are blessed with a Trader Joe’s or other market with fresh, pre-cut butternut squash, go for 24oz (or 2 small 12 oz. Trader Joe’s bags of cut squash)
5 cups of water
1 teaspoon fresh thyme taken off the stems
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary taken off the stems
1 medium sized yellow onion (sub white if it’s all you have!), diced up into small pieces
2 carrots peeled and diced up
2 stalks of celery, diced as well.
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
salt & pepper to taste (add throughout cooking and taste, adding more as you go)
olive oil (not extra virgin) for cooking

To make: In a large soup pot add a few tablespoons of olive oil and turn on the burner to medium heat. Add the carrots, celelery, garlic and onion along with the fresh thyme and rosemary. You’ll need to stick by the pot for a while, asyou will stir all of this as the veggies cook together with the herbs for 10 minutes. If you don’t stir, you risk burning the garlic or onion and this won’t turn out well, so stick around and stir.

Add the water and butternut squash and turn up the heat until everything reaches a boil.

Once you have a boil, put the lid halfway on the pot (or uncovered if you must) and reduce the heat back down to medium/low so you maintain a simmer.

Simmer for 20 minutes or until the squash is tender all the way through.

At list point you should take the almost-soup off the burner and let things cool down a bit. Once it cools for 30 minutes (covered) or so, you can either remove the pot from heat and use an immersion blender in the pot to carefully blend the entire pot into a creamy soup… or… let it cool extremely well (to room temp) and then add to your blender in batches, pouring each batch back into the pot and whirring the next batch until you have a creamy soup. ( Note— *Do not put anything hot in a blender, and do not use an immercion blender on steaming hot liquid or anything as it is cooking- two recipies for bad news!)

Once it’s all blended & creamy, you can now re-heat to piping hot to serve.

Enjoy! Compliments of my sister Nicole! xoxo Dana

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