Five-Spice Butternut Soup (Butternut Squash)

Member Name: Whizz11

Product:	Butternut Squash
Date:	09/11/09 (80 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tasty, easy, healthy, quick

Disadvantages: None

As autumn turns to winter my thoughts turn to comfort foods and in particular home made soups. I love making soups as they are really easy and tasty and one of my favourite ingredients at this time of year is the Butternut Squash. A Butternut squash is a type of winter squash. It has a sweet, nutty taste that is similar to pumpkin. It has yellow skin and orange fleshy pulp. When ripe, it turns increasingly deep orange, and becomes sweeter and richer. It grows on a vine.

It is rounded at the bottom and then thinner at the top and looks a bit like a pumpkin on the outside with a similar type skin. It's a really easy vegetable to work with. When I put it in a soup all you have to do is peel it, boil it down and then it gets pulpier. It has a really strong rich taste and really thickens up a soup which I like.

The following is a recipe that was passed to me, Five Spice Butternut Soup

1 medium butternut squash (1kg) peeled and chopped
3-4 decent cloves of garlic, peeled but whole
2 tsp Chinese five spice powder
1 tbsp caster sugar
500ml chicken stock
50ml double cream

Put the squash and garlic in a large saucepan with the five-spice, sugar and stock. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 20 minutes until soft. Pour into a liquidiser or blitz with a stick blender, then stir in the cream and serve.

It's as simple as that. The five spices gives it quite a strong spicy flavour so you can use a bit less if you don't like that taste/smell. The Chinese spices to me have a licorice type smell but once you mix it with the butternut squash it calms it down a bit. Also, I find once the mixture has boiled for 20 minutes you can always mash it up with a potato masher if you like you soup quite thick.

Enjoy.

Summary: Butternut Squash soup