Butternut squash soup with roasted garlic

Cheaters always prosper, Installment 1: Take preroasted garlic from the deli, lovingly prepared chicken broth and mix with a roasted squash, whir and you've got a recipe for an easy, tasty soup. Since you bake the squash on a parchment-paper lined pan, cleanup is easy, too. Roasted garlic is one of the convenience foods/indulgences I allow myself, since the cost-to-reward ratio is so favorable.

Butternut squash soup with roasted garlic
Adapted from Martha Stewart's Healthy Quick Cook. Read the maven’s full, original recipe here.

Ingredients
1 large butternut squash, halved lengthwise and seeded, sprinkled with sea salt and black pepper
8 sprigs of fresh thyme, divided
½ cup peeled roasted garlic cloves (thank you, Kowalski’s deli elves)
1½ to 2 cups homemade chicken broth
¼ teaspoon white pepper

Method
Preheat oven to 450. Put a couple of sprigs of thyme in each squash half and place cut-side down on a parchment-lined baking sheet. I roasted this for 35 minutes in a convection oven; add 5-7 minutes more for a conventional oven.

Remove the skins from the squash and the roasted thyme leaves from the stems. Puree in food processor one half at a time with one half of the garlic. (Unless you have a truly massive food processor, don’t try this all in one batch; you’ll wind up with random chunks rather than a smooth mixture. Adding a few tablespoons of broth can help the food processor do its job.)

Pour squash-garlic mixture into a large pan. Add 1½ cups broth, white pepper and salt to taste. Heat through, adding more broth as necessary to achieve desired texture. Spoon into bowls, topping with leaves from the remaining thyme sprigs for garnish.

Serves 4 very generously

You might be tempted to brush the squash with olive oil first, but there’s no need. The squash winds up as moist and tender as if you’d brushed it with oil first; placing it cut-side down on parchment helps seal in the moisture. 

 

This made a great soup for lunch on a gray lazy Sunday, paired with turkey-smoked gouda Panini and cranberry walnut coleslaw. That followed some tangy cran-orange scones for breakfast. 

All around, it’s been a Beelzebetty kind of weekend. Saturday morning was spent provisioning Lyndale Ave. style: First a stop at the library, then South Lyndale Liquors where we discovered they had the beer Dave had been seeking from a Mankato brewery. Then on to Northern Brewer to get supplies for his next batch, followed by a stop at Kowalski’s for that roasted garlic. Since plane tickets to San Diego aren’t in the cards, we got our fish taco fix at Republic (along with some awesome chevre artichoke dip) before catching the still-fab Minnesota Orchestra in exile at Ted Mann. Even the busker was there, outside on a chilly night. That’s totally worth a buck.