This Easy Carrot and Butternut Squash Soup is a delicious combination of onions, carrots, butternut squash and just a touch of spice. Not only is it delicious, but it’s packed with nutritional goodness, it counts as 3 of your 5 a day and only contains 167 calories per serving!
Place the olive oil and diced onions in a fairly large saucepan and gently fry for 5 minutes, with the lid on, until softened but not brown. Stir occasionally.
Add the garlic, chilli flakes and spices. Fry for 1 more minute, stirring occasionally. (Add a small splash of water if it gets too dry.)
Add the chopped carrots, chopped butternut squash, vegetable stock, salt and pepper and turn up the heat. Bring to the boil, then turn the heat right down and simmer for 20 minutes with the lid on, or until the vegetables are quite soft.
Tip the soup into a blender and blitz until completely smooth. PLEASE TAKE CARE AS THE SOUP WILL BE VERY HOT! (See Note 4.)
If necessary, return the blended soup back to the saucepan and warm back up to your desired temperature. Add more water if the soup is too thick for your liking. You may also wish to check the seasoning at this point too.
I find, because this soup is blended until smooth, there is no need to peel the carrots. Not peeling the carrots has no negative impact on the final soup, means you get extra goodness from the skins and saves you a job!
Peeling butternut squash can be a bit of a pain. A little hack to speed things up is to cut the butternut squash into thick disks, then place each disk (flat side down) on your chopping board and chop the skin off using a knife, cutting downwards all the way around each disk. I find this far quicker and easier than peeling!
I prefer to only add black pepper to this soup, as the salt content of the stock cube makes this soup salty enough for my tastes.
If you prefer, you can use a stick blender or leave the soup un-blended.
Suitable for freezing.
Nutrition information is approximate and meant as a guideline only.