Cooking with Team Logue – Episode 5 Lee-Ann’s Butternut Squash Soup

(Video Transcription)

hi I’m Lee-Ann Santos i’m Team Logue’s in-house designer and home stylist and tonight I’m gonna be making a butternut squash soup with a rosemary crueton.

So to start I always chop up a full big onion a little bit of carrot and celery diced and I throw that into hot olive oil to get it translucent and to get it softened up before I move on to adding the parsley and cilantro which I will actually throw that in a little bit later.  I’ve just got it chopped and ready to go I use a box of vegetable stock but one of the things that I like to add in are these little bullion cubes and I buy the McCormick’s were vegetarian but these are a chicken taste but they’re actually vegetable based and they have brought my soup game to the next level. The spices that I’m gonna add into this soup today and you can add in whatever you like or whatever you have but I’m using ground coriander, some tumeric, garlic powder, a little bit of salt I’ll add pepper in as well there’s some fresh ginger and some fresh garlic and I will throw the spices into the celery onion and carrot mixture once that gets going before I add to stock.

So I’ve got some olive oil into the pot that I get nice and hot I’ve already prepped my squash and carrots.  I do about one and a half carats here that I add in to boil later on when when I add in stock some water my bullion cubes and all that. So for now we’ll add in the celery and the carrots I will just stir this around until it’s nice and translucent and softened down so our vegetables are cooking really nicely here so I like to add all of my spices in so that they the heat brings the flavor out of them. So mix in there and then I’ll cook it first couple of seconds you can start to smell it you’ll know that it’s heating up they taste great as a combination and I will now add in all of my squash and carrots so that they can cook for a quick moment with spices as well before I add in any of these liquids. So I’m going to just break up the bullion it’ll break naturally but I just tend to break it up as i put it into the mixture add some pepper give that a little stir around the tumeric give everything a really nice color as well. I always add some tumeric and it’s very good for you.

Okay and now I will add in some stock and today I’m using a president choice organic vegetable broth but you can use whatever you have on hand so you can add in one full broth box or you can make your own just say yes I do like to add in some water as well I never just use the store-bought stock I do like it but I always add some water in two cups of water so while I’m waiting for the stock to come to a boil I’m gonna get my croutons ready for the oven I’ve turned it on to 400 so give it kind of hot I may end up boiling them a little bit near the end but for now we’ll just sprinkle olive oil all over it so yummy I’m gonna add some dried rosemary if I had fresh I would use fresh absolutely but I just have dried for today so that’s fine living my best quarantine life.

I’m gonna use a little bit of dried parsley as well just because I like it and some garlic powder as I tend to put garlic powder on everything. Just mix it around I think I might need a little bit more olive oil actually but you can do it through your own likeness whatever works for you know just try to get all the spices incorporated in there. Let’s see there might be enough so you just sort of mix it all around get it sort of into one level on the pan so everything can bake off nicely and we’ll flip it in about five minutes six minutes and see how it’s toasting. So I’ve got the croutons in the oven I’ve got the stock starting to come to a boil and I’m also going to add as a topping to the soup some pan-roasted pumpkin seeds. Alright so I just do it in a dry pan and just you know whatever just sprinkle a bit every one in there and then I’m just going to do them with a dry pan over high heat until you start to smell them and then once you do I just take them off and pop them into a bowl so that you can sprinkle them on the soup. Okay so I blended everything until the vegetables were soft which they are now with a fork I’ve added in the cilantro and the parsley and I’m just going to use this blender to immersion blender to to grind everything together. You can be sloppy in your own kitchen. Let me just wipe this up.

We’re going to garnish it with our croutons which toasted up really nicely I didn’t even have to boil them they just got nice and browned in a 400 degree oven and that’s just a 70% rye bread I had left over from cobs yesterday and I didn’t want it to go to waste so that’s how why I decided to make croutons for it.

Enjoy.