Recipe of the Month: Butternut Squash Soup with Apple and Leek

Whew! Over this past weekend, I have probably eaten more meat than I did during the rest of the year combined. My folks always get a free-range turkey for Thanksgiving, mostly to accommodate me, and from Thursday through Saturday I consumed parts of it for at least four meals: Thanksgiving dinner itself, then turkey sandwiches for lunch on Friday and Saturday, and Thanksgiving leftovers for Saturday dinner. Of course, I wouldn't have eaten so much turkey if I didn't enjoy it, but still, it was kind of a relief to get back to my more normal plant-based diet tonight with a new vegan recipe. And, of course, it also allowed me to slip in this month's Vegan Recipe of the Month just under the wire.

This recipe, or at least the inspiration for it, came out of the Fix-It and Forget-It Vegetarian Cookbook, which I picked up cheap a few years ago. I forget just where it came from; maybe it was the library book sale, or maybe it was part of our regular December trip to Half Price Books. But whatever its source, it went onto our cookbook shelf and basically just sat there. Whenever I was looking for a recipe, I skipped right over it and went straight to the more familiar cookbooks we've worked with before. As far as I can recall, we've never actually made anything at all from it. 

This month, I got to thinking it was a bit silly to have this cookbook taking up space on our shelf if we weren't going to use it, so I decided to take it out and put it to the test. I paged through it and found that most of the recipes in it wouldn't be all that useful for us, as they have a fairly heavy emphasis on dairy, which we've largely given up. But I happened to hit on one recipe for Acorn Squash Soup with Apples and Leeks that I thought could be converted to vegan without too much difficulty. The only dairy ingredient in it was a half-cup of half-and-half, and I believed a substitution of canned coconut milk would fit in perfectly well with the rest of the ingredients (acorn squash, vegetable broth, apple, leeks, and a touch of ground nutmeg).

We also replaced the acorn squash in the recipe with butternut squash, which tastes much the same and which we always have on hand. As I noted last month, last year's crop lasted us over a year, because we always grow a lot of it and we have a limited number of recipes that call for it. We seldom make our beloved butternut squash lasagna anymore because it requires so much dairy, and so far, we haven't dared to risk making it with our new vegan mozzarella and almond milk for fear of mucking up the texture. So that leaves only a handful butternut dishes we make recipe: butternut squash souffle, black bean and butternut quinoa bowl, butternut squash pizza with sage, and roasted fall veggies with eggs. So I figured this new soup recipe, if we liked it, could provide an opportunity to expand our repertoire.

Making the soup was pretty easy. The recipe calls for baking the squash in the oven for half an hour, but Brian skipped that and used the microwave method we follow when making souffle or lasagna: zap the entire squash in the microwave for about 20 minutes, let it cool, and peel and mash it. He did that ahead of time in the afternoon, and come dinnertime, all he had to do was stir the soft squash into a big pot with a chopped apple (skin and all), a sliced leek, and three cups of veggie broth. Then all it needed was 15 minutes of simmering, a half-cup of coconut milk, a quick blending in the pot with our stick blender, and a sprinkle of nutmeg before serving.

And the result was...interesting. It's quite unlike most of our other soup recipes, because the butternut squash and apple together give it a distinctly sweet flavor, while the leeks and vegetable broth (from our favorite Penzey's vegetable stock) provide a savory background. It's sweet, tart, salty, and savory, all at once. And as I suspected, the coconut milk blends in quite unobtrusively with the other ingredients. Eked out by Brian's half-wholemeal biscuits, it made a perfectly enjoyable meal, but I wouldn't say I prefer it to any of the other butternut recipes we make regularly. So I don't know if it will earn a place in our regular rotation.

As for the Fix-It and Forget-It Vegetarian Cookbook, I'm not prepared to keep it solely on the strength of one recipe that we thought was fairly good. But based on the quality of this one dish, I'm prepared to spend a little more time delving into its pages and see if there are any more hidden gems to be unearthed.