My love for butternut squash soup originated at Au Bon Pain - I tried a butternut squash apple soup while eating lunch there years ago and I loved it. My love for butternut squash soup multiplied times infinity thanks to Hale & Hearty.
Hale & Hearty is a chain of soup/salad/sandwich stores in the New York area - I believe they are primarily based in New York City. They have an extensive soup menu that changes daily, and their sandwiches and salads are pretty delicious as well. Everyday, at about 9:30 am I check their website for the soups of the day and based upon what I see being offered for lunch, I will decide if I need to refrigerate what I brought for lunch to eat tomorrow. H&H's butternut squash soup is mainly offered during the fall and winter, so this is the time of year where I sometimes debate whether I should even bother making lunch to bring into work or take some time off from doing that until the new year.
Given that buying lunch everyday can get really expensive what with the holidays right around the corner, I began to consider making my own soup. And that is how we got here, folks.
I thought I would share this butternut squash recipe that I made recently which turned out to be pretty decent. Here is the link for the recipe - I found it on the Calorie Count about.com page:
This recipe is low-fat and low-calorie, which was the main reason for why I decided to make it. This recipe was fairly easy to make - the most time consuming things had to be the peeling and chopping up of the squash (which my husband did for me because he is awesome), onions, carrots and apple, and then waiting for the soup to cool so that I could blend everything together. Apart from using a blender to mix everything together smoothly, this is basically a one pot meal.
I tweaked it a bit by adding one chopped apple - a honey crisp apple because this is what I had on hand at the time - to give it some sweetness. I would also recommend adding either a bit more salt or maybe swapping out one cup of low-sodium chicken broth for one-cup of regular sodium (??) chicken broth to get more flavor in there. I found that this recipe needed a bit more salt than what it originally called for, but for those of you who are watching your sodium intake - just follow the recipe.
This soup was very filling. I had it for lunch with some honey wheat pretzel rods on the side and I did not even get a 4:00 p.m. snack craving. Based upon that alone, this soup was a winner for me!
Here are some photos of the cooking process, and let me know what you think about this soup if you decide to try it too.
Enjoy!
(Ignore the Twizzlers!! Ha ha ha!!)
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