Squash, sweet potato and roasted garlic soup

I got this great cookbook for Christmas from my friend Meg. I had been wanting to make the ginger carrot soup but Chris pretty much insisted that I make the squash soup. Because I had so much luck with my previous soup recipe (fish stew), I decided to follow the recipe completely, without any tweaking. It came out really well, but not at all how it was pictured. I’m such a visual person, I usually like to see what the final product should look like and work from there. Alas, my soup was thicker than I had imagined, but nonetheless delicious!

The ingredients…

1 acorn or butternut squash (we used butternut, of course)

1 sweet potato (roughly 12 oz)

4 shallots

olive oil

5-6 garlic cloves, unpeeled

3 1/2 cups chicken stock, veggie stock, or water (we used homemade broth which really made a difference in this soup)

1/2 cup creme fraiche or sour cream (we used yogurt!)

salt and pepper

fresh chive, chopped

cayenne (optional)

The process…

Preheat the oven to 375.

Basically this recipe calls for roasting all of the veggies, adding the roasted veggies to a pot with some liquid, cooking it down and eventually pureeing it. So first prepare the veggies by cutting the squash in half and scooping out the seeds, cut the sweet potato in half. Peel the shallots and cut them in half. Lastly, collect the garlic cloves but leave them in their skin (if you’ve had roasted garlic before you know what a difference this makes. If you were to unpeel them they would probably burn. Keeping them in their skin allows them to get mushy and intensifies the flavor).

Put all of the veggies, face down, on a baking sheet. You may want to put some olive oil down first. Roast for about 40 minutes or until everything is tender and slightly browned. Let cool until they can be worked with by hand. Throw the roasted shallots into a large pot, scoop out the flesh of the squash, sweet potato and garlic and add it with the shallot. Add the stock and bring to a boil, allow to simmer for about 30 minutes or until the veggies break down.

Transfer to food processor or use immersion blender to puree the soup until desired consistency. Return to pot (if using food processor) and season with salt and pepper. Add a dash of cayenne if desired (I add this to just about everything). Swirl in creme fraiche, sour cream or yogurt.