Soup of the Week – Autumn Vegetable

I know, I know. It’s cold and it’s snowing. It feels like winter, not late autumn.

But I promise you this autumn vegetable soup will warm you up from head to toe and from the inside out!

I am not a big fan of traditional vegetable soup. I don’t know why because I do love vegetables. But we’ll address that little idiosyncrasy another time. This recipe is not your traditional vegetable soup.

I think I found this looking for a variation on our standard butternut squash soup. Not that butternut squash soup isn’t lovely all by itself – it is. Butternut squash soup reminds me of our honeymoon in Vermont and it was quite snowy that week. The Hub loves butternut squash soup, although not because of our honeymoon. On our honeymoon, he wouldn’t even try it, despite the fact that the eatery across the street from our inn served what is quite possibly the best butternut squash soup on the planet.

Until now.

I planned to make the Hub butternut squash soup because he so patiently waited through the cream of mushroom soup. Conveniently, one of our final CSA pickups of the season brought us a butternut squash of rather large size. I wanted a recipe that included some Granny Smith apples because I had a couple on hand.

And that’s when I stumbled upon this recipe. Not only does it have butternut squash, Granny Smith apple, and your standard onion, but also includes carrots, sweet potatoes, and turnips! I was pretty excited about that because I happened to have all of those in my kitchen, thanks to our terrific CSA.

This just sounded like the perfect soup. With the exception of the sweet potaotes, those are all things my family will eat willingly. Zilla loves sweet potatoes; the Hub does not. Did I tell my Husband there were sweet potatoes in it? No. No, I didn’t. So if he’s reading this, well, now he knows. And he did like the soup – ate it more than once. So, you know, there goes that…

But this has maple syrup in the recipe and I knew he would love that. The Hub loves maple syrup and it’s from Vermont, so I went for it.

And it was delicious.

I grabbed the recipe via Pinterest and the pin took me to a site called Recipe Girl. Lori is the blogger there and she gives great information about this recipe, it’s nutritional information, and how to make it gluten-free, if you’re into that. It tastes and feels decadent, but it comes in at under 150 calories per cup. Click over to Lori’s site to get all the nutritional information as well as her recipes for a mixed green salad with apple cider vinaigrette to pair with this.

Autumn Vegetable Soup (found on RecipeGirl.com)

For my What You Need and What to Do sections, head over to Recipe Girl and grab the original recipe. You’ll find terrific autumn vegetables, maple syrup, and a bit of cayenne pepper in the mix. OH, and only two steps to a beautiful soup.

That’s it!

What I think you should know:

The recipe calls for peeled and chopped butternut squash with seeds discarded. I saved my seeds and roasted them just like pumpkin seeds. Delicious.

I used my immersion blender for this one. I got a beautiful velvety texture and didn’t have to get the Vitamix involved.

The cayenne pepper was just a bit too much heat for Kidzilla and the Hub – they are less tolerant of that than I am. I thought it was perfect. Zilla solved the problem for herself with a dollop of sour cream, which is never a bad thing in a soup like this. You easily reduce or eliminate the cayenne if you prefer.

It tastes great with some chives sprinkled on top or some roasted pumpkin (or squash!) seeds. I had some that I did in Worchestershire and Sriracha that were awesome.

We served this alongside a pasta salad that started out as “Waldorf-ish Pasta Salad” and we’ve come to know as “Dad’s Favorite Pasta Salad.” The Hub loves this stuff. I made this for him once several years ago when I was looking for something Waldorf salad-ish to do with leftovers.

We vary it a bit every time, depending on what we have on hand, but basically, here’s our version.

The Hub’s Favorite Pasta Salad (Waldorf-ish Pasta Salad)

What you need:

• pasta – Use 8 to 16 oz. of dried pasta, depending on how much you want. Just about any sturdy shape will work; I don’t recommend long skinny noodles for this. We like penne and rotini best.
• apple – Any kind will do, but our favorites are Granny Smith, Jazz, and Honeycrisp
• nuts – Walnuts or pecans are best, but the Hub wants to try cashews. We’ll see.
• dried fruit and/or fresh grapes – We’ve used raisins, golden raisins, dried cherries, and dried cranberries. Currants or dried apricots would probably also work well. The grapes are good as well, any type but go for seedless for sure.
• matchstick carrots – We love the crunch these provide. If you don’t have them, go without, but it adds crunch and color to the overall effect. We hate celery here, but you could use that, too.
• sunflower seeds – I don’t always use them, but these are a nice addition, too. If we don’t have
• mayonnaise – We are diehard Hellmann’s fans here, but use your favorite or go with a Greek yogurt instead. We’ve done that, too. (Don’t tell my Husband.) Use enough to lightly coat the salad.
• Dijon mustard – Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don’t. It depends on the flavor of whatever chicken is going in. Creamy or whole grain – both are a nice touch. Just a bit here, depending on your taste – we use about a tablespoon. Ish.
• chopped or sliced cooked chicken – I never make chicken specifically for this salad. For some reason, I usually do this with leftovers, but go ahead and cook up a chicken breast or two. If you do, plain old olive oil, salt, and pepper is always terrific. Any type of chicken treatment works here – we’ve used them all.
• seasoning – This is up to you. As a rule, we just let it stand without additional seasoning since the chicken will have some flavor to it already. It works well that way. The most I add is some freshly ground pepper.
• lemon juice or zest – Some versions of a Waldorf salad will include lemon juice or zest or even orange. I don’t usually use it, but sometimes if the mood strikes me, I sprinkle a bit of lemon juice into the mix. I don’t use it when I have the Dijon, though, because I think it’s too much to use both. Just my two cents.

How much of these ingredients? Well, that all depends on you. We used to make a huge bowl of this with an entire box of pasta, then have it for dinner and several packed lunches. But that was when we were both eating packed lunches every day. Different now. The Hub gets a salad at work every day and I usually stick to soup at home. Anyway, more often than not, we make a half box of pasta.

I usually use one to two apples, depending on the size (our market has HUGE apples lately) and now much pasta you are making. For the rest of the ingredients, I do my “cover the top” method which just means put in what looks good to you.

We keep the skin on the apples. Why lose the nutrients and fiber? But I do recommend organic apples as a rule since they can be so in pesticide absorption.

We like a whole wheat pasta best for this because it gives it a nice hearty flavor. Plain white pasta is fine, too, but I think it tastes a bit bland. For this last batch, I used half a bag of the cute Halloween pasta Zilla picked up at the market. Visually amusing, yes, and the orange noodles were a nice touch, but the taste was kind of blah, in my opinion.

This is usually a pretty colorful dish, but for some reason this one looked kind of plain. It tasted good, though! We had it with our soup for dinner, and the Hub got a couple of lunches from the leftovers.

So there you have it – two recipes for the price of one this week. Go make some food!

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Coming soon, the Rachael Ray “stoup” my Mom found. Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Have you tried a great soup recently? Let me know!

And for my regular soup readers, Soup of the Week will run more like Soup of Every Other Week since we often re-use soups that have been posted here. For example, Zilla wants tomato soup again. On the in-between weeks, I’ll bring you a smoothie recipe or something else delicious!