Butternut Squash Soup

I feel like a broken record when I say this, but I thought I didn't like butternut squash.  That is, until I actually tried it.  Last year I was at a friend's baby shower and they were serving butternut squash soup as part of the buffet, so I decided to try it out.  Boy was I surprised when I actually liked it!  When my husband and I were coming up with a menu for our party this fall, I knew I wanted to serve some sort of soup, so I did a search and came across this recipe.

I've made this soup twice now.  The first time I bought a full butternut squash which I peeled and seeded myself.  I did a bit of searching to find out how to do this and came across this video on YouTube.  The video is about a minute long, so it must be easy to do this yourself, right?  Yeah, not so much.  The cutting and seeding part isn't so awful (though you have to be careful when cutting since you don't have flat surfaces to let it sit securely on), but it's the peeling that was difficult.  The video makes it seem like you can just use a regular vegetable peeler.  But the skin was too thick to do this, and the squash wasn't a good shape to peel, so I ended up doing it all with a paring knife.  It took a very long time, so the next time I made this, I bought the pre-cut squash that my supermarket sells.

The other thing that I realized after the second time I made this that another thing I can change is that I can just use my immersion blender to puree this in the pot instead of having to take the squash out of the pot with a slotted spoon and use a blender, then put it back in the pot to finish off.

This really makes for a wonderful fall/winter dish.  I plan on making this again before winter is over.

Butternut Squash Soup (slightly adapted from this recipe posted on Foodnetwork.com)

Ingredients
2-3 lbs of butternut squash (approx 1 large), peeled and seeded
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1 medium onion, chopped
6 cups of Imagine No-Chicken Broth (vegetable stock can be substituted, or regular chicken stock if you do not keep a kosher home)
salt, pepper, and ground nutmeg to taste

Directions
- Cut squash into 1 inch chunks. 
- In a large pot, melt butter.  Add the onion and cook until translucent (about 8 min).
- Add squash and stock.  Bring to a simmer and cook until squash is tender (about 15-20 min).
- Using an immersion blender, puree the squash and onion.  If you do not have an immersion blender, remove squash and onion chunks with a slotted spoon and place in a blender to puree.  Return the blended squash and onion to the pot.
- Stir and season with nutmeg, salt and pepper.