Ah, soup weather in New England. The air in Salem is finally turning a little colder, at least in the evenings. There are few things I love more on a nippy night than having a steaming pot of soup bubbling merrily away on the stove.

For this soup, I started with Julia Child’s famous Potato Leek Soup—the same basic Potage Parmentier that transported Julie Powell at the beginning of her Julie & Julia Project.

And I can see why. The fact that you can coax a bagful of regular ole potatoes and pointy leeks into a such a velvety, luxurious soup is kind of unbelievable. That’s a special kind kitchen magic.

Of course, it’s hard to argue with Julia’s recipe. It’s simple and delicious. But autumn’s coming, you know. Which means I’m inclined to toss bacon into everything I responsibly can.

For this version, I used a combination of butter AND cream, instead of one or the other. I garnished the soup with crispy bacon cooked with fresh thyme. I deglazed the bacon with a little cognac—then drizzled a little extra into the serving bowls for good measure.

The results were absolutely sublime.

This soup is thick, creamy, and slightly smokey. You can do without the cognac, but a little splash before serving gives the soup an extra punch of warmth, flavor, and downright decadence.

For a budget version of this soup, omit the cognac and the bacon. You’ll still wind up with a pot of stick-to-your-ribs, creamy yumminess.

Serve it with a few hunks of crusty garlic bread.

How to clean leeks

Don’t skip this step. It doesn’t take long, and if your leeks are really dirty it can totally spoil your soup.

Leeks are like onions, and have layers that trap and hold grit easily.

This means you have to rinse the filthy little beasts well before using them. In case you don’t know how, I’ve included instructions on how to clean them. It’s really easy.

Oh, one quick note on pureeing hot soup

This soup is pureed. You can accomplish that a number of ways.

With a blender (which can be messy, what with transferring the hot soup to and from the blender).

With a couple of forks or a potato masher (for a rougher textured, more rustic soup).

Or with an immersion blender (for an easy, practically mess-free, smooth puree).

Now, normally, I’m not one to go in for a lot of specialized kitchen gadgets. But, hands down, my immersion blender is one of my favorite tools in the kitchen.

It’s basically a stick with blender blades on one end, and it works just like a powerboat motor. Drop it in the drink, turn it on, and puree away.

I can’t say enough about mine. I use it all the time for sauces and soups. It makes weeknight soup making really easy. You can pick up a similar Cuisinart model for just about $30 on Amazon.

OK. To the kitchen!

Potato Leek Soup

4 cups white potatoes, peeled and cut into small dice
3 cups leeks, cleaned and finely sliced (1-2 leeks, depending on their size)
7 cups water
1 Tbls. kosher salt
3 Tbls. butter
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 tsp. ground white pepper
2-3 slices of bacon, diced
1 tsp. fresh thyme, minced
2 Tbls. cognac + more for garnish
fresh parsley, minced, for garnish

Serves 6-8

Clean the leeks

Skip right on ahead if you know how to do this. Otherwise, grab your leeks.

Nip off the root ends.

Whack off a few inches at the green end.

Then slice each leek lengthwise down the center, like this.

You’ll see all those layers, and depending on how dirty your leeks are, you may see why you need to clean them.

Rinse each half under cold running water.

Spread the layers apart a little with your fingers, so the water can run between them.

Pat them dry with paper towels, then slice them into thin half moons.

Repeat with the rest of your leeks until you have about 3 cups. (This is one of those recipes that’s forgiving and kind of imprecise. Don’t make yourself nuts if you have a little over or under.)

Peel and dice the potatoes

Dice your potatoes on the small side.

As a general rule, I’m not much for measurements like “a quarter inch dice,” because I’m not sure I’d ever bust out a ruler in the kitchen to double check my work. (Though, admittedly, there are times when precision matters.)

For this recipe, cut your potatoes about the size of a piece of Bubble Yum. Basically, you just want them small enough that they cook evenly and relatively quickly.

Here’s one on the end of my 10-inch butcher’s knife.

Simmer the potato leek soup

Put the leeks and potatoes in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the water.

Toss in the salt.

Give it a stir to combine. Then bring it up to a boil over high heat.

Once it boils, drop the heat to medium and cover the pot, leaving the lid cracked (so the soup reduces as it cooks). You want the heat high enough so that you maintain a simmer.

Simmer for about 45 minutes.

Puree and finish the soup

After about 45 minutes, the liquid should have reduced some and the veggies should be fork tender. It will be fairly watery and sad looking, though your kitchen should smell heavenly.

Take the soup off the heat.

Puree the soup however you like (with an immersion blender, traditional blender, or potato masher) until it’s smooth.

If you’re using an immersion blender, be sure the soup is deep enough to cover the blades (otherwise it will splatter all over). If it isn’t, just tip the pot a little.

Add the butter, cream, and white pepper. Stir until well combined. Cover it up while you make the bacon garnish.

Garnish the soup, serve, and enjoy!

Dice the bacon up and put it in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Stir in the minced thyme. Stir to combine.

Fry the bacon until it’s crisp.

Deglaze the pan with 2 tablespoons of cognac. (Be careful, there will be a poof of steam.) Scrape at the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to loosen all those flavorful brown bits.

Cook for another minute over medium-high heat, stirring until most of the liquid evaporates. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside.

To serve, drizzle a little cognac in the bottom of each soup bowl. Use a tablespoon or two per bowl, depending on your taste. (If you’re unsure on this part, start with less.)

Fill bowls with soup. Garnish with crisp bacon and chopped parsley.

Enjoy!

Check out a reader’s twist on this recipe

Update�October 21, 2009�Take a peek at Annelle’s take on this recipe. (She added cheese!)

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There are a lot of methods for making chicken stock. Some folks make it in the slow cooker. Some folks make it in the oven. This is one of the ways that I make mine on top of the stove. It’s a good, basic method and yields a richly flavored, golden chicken stock that’s a good base for soups and sauces.

Roasting all the ingredients before simmering them is one key to a deeply chicken-y flavored stock.

Customize this recipe to create your own unique stock. Some ideas for add-ins:

+More garlic + fresh ginger + fresh chili peppers
+Fennel + fresh thyme + celery root
+Smoked pork hock + rosemary + parsnip

One of my favorite things to do with this is make good, old-fashioned chicken noodle soup, with alphabet noodles.

What kind of chicken should you use for chicken stock?

I’ll typically whip up a batch of this whenever I find a good sale on chicken parts. This time, I got a huge package of chicken necks. I usually prefer the mix of chicken wings, necks, and backs that my mom uses, but just didn’t like the way they looked this time.

All that said, you can do this with a leftover roasted chicken carcass. If you can find ‘em (and are brave enough to deal with them), chicken feet also make fabulously velvety stock because of all the gelatin in them.

The basic technique for homemade chicken stock

This stock takes a few hours to cook, but actually requires very little active time on your part. I like to make stock on the weekend, when I can get it cooking and keep an eye on it while I get other stuff done.

Roast your chicken and veggies (skins and all) to brown them and start developing flavor. Toss them in a pot with water and simmer for a few hours. Skim off the fat, strain the stock, and freeze.

The onion skin helps give the stock a deep, golden color.

Basic Homemade Chicken Stock: A note on stock pots

I use a pasta pot with a built in strainer to make this stock, because I like how easy the insert makes it to remove all the big ingredients. Just be careful not to fill it to the top, or the stock may boil out between the strainer and the pot and make a huge mess.

If you don’t have a pasta pot, just use any big pot you have. Be sure that it has a tight-fitting lid.

Basic Homemade Chicken Stock

3 lbs. assorted chicken necks, backs & wings
1 large sweet onion, cut up into large pieces
15 baby carrots (or 2-3 regular carrots, chopped roughly)
4 ribs celery, cut up into large pieces
1 head garlic, sliced in half
water
1 bay leaf
kosher salt
freshly cracked black pepper
olive oil
fresh parsley

Yields about 8 cups of stock

Basic Homemade Chicken Stock: Roast the chicken and veggies

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Line 2 sheet pans with foil and parchment paper and set aside.

Like I said, I had big package of chicken necks. Give them a rinse and pat them dry.

Cut up your veggies and spread them out on one of your prepared pans. Sprinkle with a little kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper.

Drizzle with a little olive oil.

Toss to coat.

Spread the chicken out on the second pan. Sprinkle with kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper.

Drizzle with olive oil. Toss to coat.

Pop both pans into your preheated 425 degree oven.

Roast for about an hour, until the chicken and veggies are nicely browned.

Basic Homemade Chicken Stock: Simmer the stock

When your chicken and veggies are browned, yank them out of the oven. Transfer the veggies to your stock pot.

Be sure to get all that juice and those brown bits.

Toss in a handful of fresh parsley if you have it on hand.

Toss the chicken into the pot with the veggies.

Again, scrape in all the juice and brown bits.

Fill the pot about 3/4 of the way full with cold water.

Give it a stir.

Toss in a little kosher salt.

Drop in a fresh bay leaf.

Set the pot on the stove over high heat. Bring it to a boil. When it starts to boil, drop the heat to low and simmer it.

When it’s been simmering for a few minutes, skim some of the fat off the surface and discard.

Drop the heat to low and cover the pot tightly. Simmer for about 1 1/2 hours. Peek at it every once and a while and skim more fat off if needed. Your stock should look about like this:

Basic Homemade Chicken Stock: Strain the stock

When the stock is ready, strain the solids out of it.

Discard the solids. (They’ll pretty much have given up all their goodness and flavor to the stock.)

Once I’ve removed the solids, I like to strain it one more time, to get all the tiny little bits out of it. Sometimes I use my chinois for this, but honestly, I hate washing the thing. Set a strainer over a large bowl. Line it with a paper towel or some cheese cloth.

Ladle the stock through the cloth into the bowl.

Repeat until you’ve strained all the stock.

You should wind up with a bunch of gunk in the strainer:

And a bunch of beautiful stock in the bowl:

You probably strained most of the fat off when it was simmering, but if you didn’t, skim most of the rest off now.

Let the stock cool to room temperature, then stick it in the fridge for 2-3 days, or split up among smaller containers and freeze for up to 3 months.

Basic Homemade Chicken Stock: Serve and enjoy!

Like I said, there are a zillion ways to use chicken stock, but my all-time favorite has to be chicken noodle soup.

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The humble potato is so versatile—and filling—that I’m not sure why I don’t use it more often.

This soup sounds fancy, but you can whip it up in no time flat—with stuff you probably already have in your house. Loaded with potatoes and heavy cream, it’s also ridiculously decadent (no diet food today!).

With this recipe, you build deep flavor quickly by browning the veggies, deglazing the pan with white wine, then simmering the soup with a fresh bay leaf and a generous amount of garlic powder.

An infusion of heavy cream, a sprinkle of nutmeg, and a drizzle of cognac added at the end elevate the soup from ordinary to fabulously yummy.

This recipe is practical for weeknights because it cooks fast and doesn’t make a giant vat. (I love making big pots of soup and freezing them, but let’s face it: Sometimes you just don’t want to go through all that trouble.)

Serve it as a starter or main course for an elegant weeknight dinner.

A note on ingredients

For the white wine, use any dry wine you like to drink. This is important, because cooking will only reduce and concentrate its flavor. (If you didn’t like it to begin with, you probably won’t like it when it’s concentrated.)

For the potatoes, use any kind you like. Because you’re going to puree the soup, consistency and firmness are less of an issue. I used russet here, because that’s what I had in the house, but you could just as easily use red or white potatoes, too.

To make this soup vegetarian, substitute veggie broth for the chicken stock.

A note on equipment (a.k.a. why I love my immersion blender)

The fastest way to puree the soup is with an immersion blender.

If you don’t have one, you can totally use a regular blender. I prefer my immersion blender because it’s faster (you puree the soup right in the pot) and there’s less clean up (no need to disassemble and wash the blender).

If you like to make soup, an immersion blender is a fabulous investment. There are a bunch of expensive ones out there that I’m sure are great. I have one that’s about 12 years old now, but this Cuisinart SmartStick Hand Blender should work just fine.

Plus, as of today at least, it’s on sale for $29.99 (that’s 45% off the $55 list price).

Cognac-Laced Potato Cream Soup

1 Tbls. butter
2 cups potato, cut into small dice
1 medium onion, cut into small dice
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 cups chicken stock
1 fresh bay leaf
1 Tbls. garlic powder
freshly cracked black pepper
1 cup heavy cream
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
a few drops of cognac
fresh parsley, minced (for garnish)

Cognac-Laced Potato Cream Soup: Prep the veggies

It’s important to cut the onion and potato up into small dice, so they cook quickly. Some recipes describe dice size in inches, which, while accurate, isn’t super helpful for me, since I don’t keep a ruler in the kitchen.

You want your potatoes to be about the size of a sugar cube.

Skin the potato and onion, then chop them up. For scale, here’s a piece of potato sitting on my 10-inch chef’s knife:

Cognac-Laced Potato Cream Soup: Brown the veggies

Melt the butter in a medium-sized pot over medium heat.

Toss in the diced potato and onion.

Give them a stir to combine and coat with butter. Raise the heat to medium-high.

Cook for a few minutes like this, stirring occasionally, until the veggies start to brown. Your goal is a thick-ish layer of browned goodness on the bottom of your pot, like this:

This will happen quickly, so don’t walk away from your pot.

Cognac-Laced Potato Cream Soup: Deglaze the pan

When the bottom of your pot is coated and your veggies are slightly browned, pour in the white wine. (Be careful, there’ll be a poof of steam.)

Leave the heat on medium-high. Scrape at the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon to loosen all those brown bits (that’s pure flavor!).

As you scrape the bottom of the pot, the wine should start to simmer and thicken considerably (from the starch in the potato). That’s just fine.

Cognac-Laced Potato Cream Soup: Add the chicken stock

When you’ve gotten all of the brown bits, pour in the chicken stock.

Toss in the bay leaf. Fresh is better, because the flavor is much more pronounced. If you don’t have them on hand, though, use a dried one.

Add the garlic powder and whisk it to mix well.

Now, this is a fair amount of garlic powder, and the soup will smell *very* garlicky until you add the cream. The cream tempers the garlic considerably. The two together are rich and mellow.

That said, if you’re concerned about it, totally use less garlic. You can always toss more in at the end if you like.

Raise the heat to high and bring the soup up to a boil.

When it’s boiling, drop the heat down to low and cover the pot tightly. Simmer covered for 10 minutes, or until your veggies are cooked through.

After 10 minutes, uncover your pot. Fish out a larger chunk of potato and onion and poke them with a fork to make sure they’re completely soft.

Cognac-Laced Potato Cream Soup: Puree the soup

When they’re cooked through, it’s time to puree the soup. Remove the bay leaf from the pot and toss it.

Using your immersion blender, puree the soup ’til it’s smooth. Turn the heat completely off while you do this.

Depending on the size of your pot, you may have to tip it a little to make the soup deep enough to blend without splattering.

If you’re using a regular blender, transfer the soup in batches to your blender and process ’til smooth. Don’t overfill your blender (so it doesn’t overflow with hot soup).

You want the soup to look about like this:

Cognac-Laced Potato Cream Soup: Finish the soup

Add the cream to the pureed soup.

Whisk the soup to thoroughly incorporate the cream.

Add the nutmeg and stir to combine.

Turn the heat on to medium-high and bring the soup up to a boil. When it’s boiling, drop the heat so that the soup is simmering. Simmer like this, uncovered, for 5 minutes, whisking occasionally.

After 5 minutes, give the soup a taste. Add more salt/pepper/garlic/nutmeg if you like.

Cognac-Laced Potato Cream Soup: Serve & enjoy!

Before serving, put a little cognac in the bottom of each soup bowl. I used maybe a half teaspoon for each bowl. Use more or less to taste.

(If you’re unsure about how much to add, start with a little. You can always stir more in.)

Ladle the soup into the bowls.

Garnish with a little fresh, minced parsley. Crispy bacon would also be a fabulous garnish.

Serve and enjoy!

Here are some of the best discounts and sales I’ve found this week.

***
Copyright 2008-2009 The Hungry Mouse™/Jessica B. Konopa. All rights reserved.

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It’s been freezing here in Boston for the last week or so, which has put me in serious comfort-food mode.

I’ve had a few days off, and have been able to flit in and out of the kitchen, tending to hearty, slow-cooking dishes. (Hehe…Hooray for vacation! I’m just sad it has to end.)

This is a fantastically warming soup that’s perfect for winter nights. I used dried beans because I prefer their texture to canned. That means I started the night before by soaking the little guys.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: Rich flavor (no stock!)

I built layers of flavor by sauteing diced bacon ’til it was crispy�then cooking sweet onion and carrots in the bacon fat until lusciously caramelized and brown.

A quick deglaze with orange juice adds a hint of sweetness that nicely balances the salty, smokey bacon. A good amount of ground chipotle and garlic give the soup some serious kick. (Not a heat lover? Just add less chili.)

I did all of this specifically to develop a deep fIavor base for the soup, because this recipe calls for water�not stock.

A fresh batch of diced carrots, some fresh orange zest and juice, and a handful of minced cilantro added at the end brighten up the soup.

The end result is spicy, smokey, a little bit sweet, and subtly fragrant with orange. If you prefer the classic chili/lime combination, you can totally substitute in lime juice and zest for the orange here.

The finished soup also thickens in the fridge. Reheat it in a bowl with a side of fluffy white rice and some freshly chopped mangoes�or add a little water or orange juice to thin it out a bit.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: A note on salt

Don’t add any until the end.

You’re using a fair amount of bacon, so your soup will already have plenty of salt built in. Better to wait ’til the end to see if you think it needs an extra sprinkle. (After all, once you put it in, you can’t get it out.)

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: Ridiculous praise for my big red pot

Use your largest, heaviest bottomed pot to make this. I started out in a smaller pot, but then wound up transferring my soup to my 7-quart Le Creuset Enameled Cast Iron Round French Oven.

I absolutely love this thing.

I got a great deal on it maybe 10 years ago. It still wasn’t cheap, but it’s held up better than almost any piece of kitchen equipment I own, so it was definitely an investment that paid off. (Amazon has it on sale for $259 right now, which is 36% off the $405 list.*) I make almost all my soups and large casseroles in it, and also use it to roast chickens, etc.

OK, enough about the pot

Get to the recipe, Mouse! Yep, yep. Here you go.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro

1 lb. dried black beans
6 rashers (strips) of bacon, diced
1 large sweet onion, diced
15 baby carrots, diced
3/4 cup of freshly squeezed orange juice
1 1/2 tsp. – 1 Tbls. ground chipotle chili (depending on how hot you want it)
1 Tbls. garlic powder
8 cups water
1 fresh bay leaf
3 Tbls. minced cilantro + a little more for garnish
1 navel orange, juice + zest
kosher salt

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro, part 1: Soak the beans the night before

The night before you want to make this soup, you’ll need to soak the beans to rehydrate them.

I like dried beans over canned. They’re a little more work in that you need to soak ‘em, but when I have the time, I definitely prefer the slight toothiness they have to canned beans, which can be mushy before you cook them.�

So, grab your beans! Any old 89-cent bag of dried black beans from the grocery store will do.

Dump them out into a large bowl.

Now, bags of dried beans usually come with some unwanted, extra treats. Pick through the beans well, and pull out any twigs or little stones. You won’t find a ton, but there will likely be a half-a-dozen or so.

I’m talking about this stuff (the stuff that’s about the size of a bean, so it gets missed in the packaging process):

When you’re done, rinse the beans.

Fill your bowl with water a few times and pour it out, holding your hand at the edge of the bowl to keep the beans from escaping.

Then fill the bowl up with water, so that the beans are covered in about 4 inches of water.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Leave it in a cool place on your counter overnight.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro, part 2: Make the black bean soup

After your beans have soaked overnight, they will have about doubled in volume. The water will also be kind of muddy looking because it’s leached some of the color out of the beans. That’s just fine.

Drain your beans. They should be more of a deep purple, not black.

Set the beans aside while you make the flavor base for the soup.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: Make the soup base

Set your largest, heaviest bottomed soup pot on the stove. Put your diced bacon in the pot.

Set the pot over medium-high heat.

Fry the bacon, stirring occasionally until the bacon is crisp and brown.

You want the bacon to look about like this:

Scoop out a spoonful or two of the bacon and set it aside to drain and use as a garnish for your finished soup.

At this point, pour off (and save for other uses!) some of the bacon fat, if you like.

Add the diced onion and about a third of the diced carrots to the pot.

Stir to combine and coat the veggies in the remaining fat.

Saute over medium-high heat until the onions are transluscent and browning.

The bottom of your pot should be coated with yummy brown bits.

Turn the heat down to medium.

Pour in the orange juice. (Watch your face and hands. There will be a poof of steam.)

Scrape at the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon to loosen all those brown bits.

Toss in the garlic powder and ground chipotle. Now, I used a full tablespoon, because I love hot food. If you don’t, definitely add less.

Stir to combine. The mixture will be really thick, as a lot of the orange juice will have evaporated�leaving you with concentrated, orange-y goodness.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: Put the soup together

Toss in the beans.

Stir to combine well. It’s not the prettiest looking stuff right now, but just you wait.

It was at this point that I realized that I should have used my trusty�and much bigger�french oven. No big deal…I quickly transferred the mixture to my larger pot.

Pour in the water.

Toss in the bay leaf and give the pot a stir. It should look about like this:

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: Simmer and bubble away

Raise the heat to high to bring the soup to a boil.

When it’s boiling, turn the heat down to low and cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid. Your goal is to keep the soup simmering, but not boiling.

Simmer covered for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: Finish the soup

After 2 hours, uncover the pot. Keep the heat on low. Your soup should look about like this:

The broth will be thicker, but still on the thin side. The beans should be cooked through without being mushy (i.e. they’ll still have a little bite to them). Taste one to be sure.

With a wooden spoon, smoosh a bunch of the beans against the inside of the pot to break them up, like this:

This will help to thicken the soup as it finishes cooking. Toss in the rest of the carrots (I chopped mine into a slightly smaller dice) and the minced cilantro.

Stir to combine.

Zest your orange with a microplane or the smallest holes on a regular old box grater. Be careful to get only the orange rind, not the bitter white pith beneath it.

Toss the zest into the soup pot.

Once you’ve zested it, cut the orange in half and squeeze the juice right into the soup.

(If your orange isn’t very juicy, just add a splash of regular orange juice to the pot here. The goal is to brighten up the soup a little with fresh orange flavor.)

Give the soup a stir to mix the juice and zest in.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: Simmer the soup one last time

Cover the pot again and simmer it for maybe another 20-30 minutes, until the carrots are cooked through. Stir occasionally, and lower your heat if you find that the soup is sticking to the bottom of the pot.

Smokey Black Bean Soup with Orange & Cilantro: Serve & enjoy!

After about a half an hour, your soup should be done. Everything should be cooked through, and it should be wonderfully thick. Taste your soup and correct the seasoning with a little salt or cilantro as you see fit.

Serve garnished with crispy bacon and minced cilantro.

*Amazon pricing for the big red pot is accurate as of the posting date/time of this article, but is subject to change. Please double-check all info before ordering.

***
Copyright 2008-2009 The Hungry Mouse�/Jessica B. Konopa. All rights reserved.

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This soup takes a while to make, but very little of that time is actually spent standing over the stove.

Chunks of butternut squash, sweet onion, and elephant garlic are slow roasted in the oven for an hour-and-a-half, then simmered quickly with chicken broth and pureed.

A cup of heavy cream added at the very end guarantees a velvety, satisfying soup.

Serve with hunks of rustic garlic bread. If you wanted to take this completely over the top, add a little cooked crab or lobster meat at the very end.

Creamy Roasted Butternut Squash Soup: A note on ingredients

Part of the appeal of this soup to me is how little prep time it actually requires.

I use pre-cut squash that I get in the produce section of my local grocery store. It costs a wee bit more, but I don’t mind one bit if it means I can avoid wrestling with a whole squash.

If you can’t find it pre-cut, you can certainly peel and chop a whole butternut squash. It will just take a little bit longer.

Creamy Roasted Butternut Squash Soup

20 oz. butternut squash, cut up into chunks (that’s about 4 cups)
1 large sweet onion
1 clove elephant garlic
1/4 cup olive oil
kosher salt
freshly cracked black pepper
7 fresh sage leaves, minced
4 cups chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream

Serves 4-6

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line a sheet pan with foil and/or parchment paper.

Creamy Roasted Butternut Squash Soup: Roast the veggies

Grab your package of pre-cut squash.

Unwrap it and spread the squash out on your prepared pan.

Chop up your onion into large-ish pieces.

Add the chopped onion to the squash on the sheet pan.

Next, peel your clove of elephant garlic. Slice it thinly and sprinkle it over the onion and squash.

Drizzle the olive oil over the veggies on your pan.

Mix the veggies up with your hands to cover them with olive oil.

Sprinkle with kosher salt, freshly cracked black pepper, and fresh minced sage to taste.

Pop the pan into your preheated oven. Roast the veggies, stirring a few times during cooking, for about 1 1/2 hours at 350 degrees.

You want them to slow cook and develop nice, caramelized edges, like this:

Creamy Roasted Butternut Squash Soup: Simmer the veggies

Transfer the veggies into a large-ish soup pot.

Pour in the chicken broth. Turn the heat on to medium-high and bring it up to a simmer.

Simmer for about 10 minutes, uncovered.

After about 10 minutes, turn your heat off.

Check your veggies for doneness. Fish out a larger piece of squash with a wooden spoon. Smoosh it against the side of the pot. If it breaks up, it’s done.

If it’s hard and refuses to come apart, simmer the soup for a few more minutes, then try again. If it breaks up easily, keep going.

Creamy Roasted Butternut Squash Soup: Puree your soup

Once your veggies are cooked through, it’s time to puree them. I do this with a handheld stick blender.

(If you don’t have one, you can totally use a regular blender. Just transfer and puree the soup in batches to ensure that you don’t overload your blender.)

Here’s my stick blender. It’s maybe 10 years old, and still does a terrific job.

This is the chewing end.

You hold down this button to turn it on and off.

Put the stick blender in the pot.

Make sure that the head of the blender is completely submerged, or else you’ll have a splatter fest on your hands. (Remember, your heat should be off at this point.)

If you can’t get your stick blender completely submerged, tip your pot a little and use the stick blender in the deep end of the pot.

Blend the soup until it’s completely pureed.

When you’ve blended up all the chunks of veggies, your soup should be pretty smooth, like this:

Creamy Roasted Butternut Squash Soup: Finish it off

Add the cream to the pot.

Puree the soup again with your handheld blender to combine it.

You want it to look about like this:

Creamy Roasted Butternut Squash Soup: Serve and enjoy!

Ladle out into bowls. Garnish with chopped chives. Enjoy!

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Copyright 2008-2009 The Hungry Mouse™/Jessica B. Konopa. All rights reserved.

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