Brrrrrrr........Jack Bishop and some Butternut Squash warm us up!

Brrrrr.....it's cold outside. The wind is howling, with gusts expected to be around 50MPH or so. Cold is bad enough, but cold and a wind like that and I'm more than happy to stay inside and not step foot outside. Brrrr.....

This kind of weather definitely makes for good soup weather, though and soup was on the menu for tonight.

I recently checked Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen out of the library. I am absolutely loving this book. So far I have tried 3 recipes and we have loved all of them - Creamy Tomato Soup, Black Bean Chilaquiles and tonight's dinner, Butternut Squash Soup with Chipotle Chiles and Garlic. I promise to come back and review the other two recipes later....

So, here I am the next day continuing with my post. The boys and I sat down to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas last night and I fell asleep! Anyway, back to the butternut squash soup....

I am continuing to use up the butternut squash in our freezer that I mentioned on a previous post. Before I go on to the soup, let me briefly mention that I used butternut squash puree in place of pumpkin in my favorite pumpkin bread and it worked beautifully (I left out the chocolate chips, though).

Butternut Squash Soup with Chipotle Chiles and Garlic
(please excuse the cruddy picture!)

The soup was a very simple recipe - pretty much just butternut puree, water, garlic and chipotle chiles. My soup ended up not being very vegetarian though, I'm afraid. I had some leftover chicken broth and butternut puree from a soup I made recently, so I dumped that in, along with 2 additional cups of puree. I can't really say that I followed any of the proportions exactly, but we got the main gist of it.

Mmmm...it was very good. With the exception of baked goods, I generally don't like my squash to be sweet, so the spice and heat from the chipotles was the perfect way to play up the savory aspects of the butternut. The croutons - I used a loaf of whole grain sourdough from Wegmans - add a nice crunch and a bit of relief from the heat. The nuttiness of the whole grains pair nicely with the squash. The soup was also extremely easy to make, considering that I already had the puree sitting in the freezer.

We are having so much fun with butternut squash puree that I have decided that I will plant at least one butternut plant in the garden next year. Our freezer supply is now down to only about 4 cups, so I'll have to be careful about what I choose next - and I've already promised my oldest that I'd make the Butternut Squash Risotto, so that really only leaves 2 cups.....maybe some more "pumpkin" bread, that was sooo good......mmm.........