Acorn Squash Apple Soup

A couple weekends ago, my parents came up bearing gifts.  One of the gifts consisted of two beautiful acorn squashes from their garden.  On Sunday, we finally got around to making something with one of the squashes.  My mom gushed to me about how amazing acorn squash apple soup is, so we decided to give it a try using this recipe as a guide, though we strayed from it.

The recipe calls for:

1 small onion, diced

1 acorn squash, peel seeded

1 carrot, peeled and sliced (we used a bunch of baby carrots)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

1 1/2 cups apple juice

2 cups vegetarian broth or 2 cups chicken broth (we used chicken base with water)

1 apple, peeled cored,and chopped (we use honeycrisp from a local market)

1/2 cup heavy cream

salt

white pepper (we used black pepper)

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1 pinch of fresh grated nutmeg (we left this out – don’t have nutmeg on hand)

1 teaspoon brown sugar or 1 teaspoon maple syrup (we used brown sugar)

yogurt or sour cream (to garnish) (left this out)

grated nutmeg (to garnish) (left this out and garnished with cinnamon)

The recipe is incredibly easy!  The hardest part was prepping everything.  It involved a good amount of chopping.

Of course, Mr. Converse Sneakers steps in to chop everything because I have delicate hands!  Ha, yeah right!

Just a tip, use a very good knife when peeling and chopping an acorn squash.  One person in the photo above may or may not have almost cut his or her finger off . . . He or she is okay though. :P

After all the goodies were chopped, in to our pot they went for about two minutes.

Then, we added the juice, stock, apple, and seasoning, adding the heavy cream once everything became tender.

We then poured it all into our blender and took ‘er for a spin.  It was loud and I thought at one point the blender might explode, but what we came away with was this:

OOOO-EEEE!  Let me tell you, this soup is DELICIOUS!  I’m the kind of girl who usually only eats stews and really thick, hearty, chock-full-of-goodies soups, like minestrone, beef stew, chili (loaded to the top with meat and beans).  I like soups I can dip things into and come back up with a heaping pile of food on my bread/cracker/chip.  This soup is not like that, but somehow it was able to woo me.  It’s the perfect blend of sweet and salty.  The texture is really nice and a little thick.  It’s a wonderful soup for the fall and I’ve eaten it every day since!

Now, we still have another acorn squash to use up – any suggestions?