As you may have already spotted from my photos on Instagram, I grew a few squashes in my new veggie patch this year and that meant that I had plenty to play around with for Halloween. Now that the spooky season is over, I want to put my squashes to good use, so I’ve come up with a recipe for a warming winter soup, packed full of root vegetables and of course my delicious home-grown squash.
Ingredients: Squash (any variety, mine was ‘Queen of Squash’ and tastes like sweet potato when baked in the oven), carrots, potatoes, swede, onions, vegetable stock cubes, olive oil, salt and pepper. Choose any quantity you like to serve any number of people – I made double the amount I thought I would need so that I could jar up the excess and enjoy it for lunch next week.
Firstly, roast the squash in the oven. I cut my squash in half, scooped out the seeds in the center and then cut into wedges to roast. Drizzle with a little olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper before roasting for about half an hour or until softened. Scoop out the soft flesh with a spoon and discard the skins.
Peel and dice the carrots, potatoes and swede so that they are roughly the same size chunks. Chop up the onion and sauté with the veggies in a little olive oil for about 3 minutes before adding enough boiling water to cover the vegetables. When the water has come back to the boil and the veg is starting to soften, add one vegetable stock cube (or more, depending on quantities, to taste) and allow the veg to continue to simmer until it can softened enough to be squashed with the back of a spoon.
Add the soft roasted squash flesh into the pan with the vegetables and blitz with your hand blender until smooth and thick. I particularly like the fact that the Aura hand blender has a variable speed dial on the top so I could use it on a slower setting when I was beginning to blend and breaking up the diced veg, and then I could increase the speed to really pulverize the soup until smooth. The only thing is that it works SO well, that the speed of the blade meant that the blender head sometimes suctioned onto the bottom of the pan, but it wasn’t a problem because the blade never comes into contact with the pan (no damage done!) so I just turned down the speed a little and carried on blitzing!
My family and I enjoyed this soup with a crusty baguette for lunch yesterday I still have some left over which I have stored in a Kilner jar in the fridge. Let me know if you try out this recipe and check more of the soup recipes on my blog – I’m definitely going to be making them all again this winter now that I’ve got a super-speedy way to blitz them up with my new Russell Hobbs hand blender!
