As I write this post, I’m completely baffled by the fact that I’ve never really shared my favorite recipes on this blog. I love food. I love eating it, buying it, thinking about it, and preparing yummy foods for myself and for my friends. As a personal finance blogger who has traditionally leaned into the frugality realm of personal finance blogging it has always driven me crazy that so many people equate frugal with eating crap food purchased at questionable places. I’ve finally decided to start sharing how I continue eating at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Safeway, and Trader Joe’s without going broke. Yes, it’s possible. I don’t eat fast food, very rarely eat fast casual. I prefer investing in good quality ingredients because food is to be enjoyed. Here is my recipe for a yummy cheap healthy eats: vegan butternut squash soup. No weird and random ingredients needed.
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Vegan Butternut Squash Soup
I’m in the process of finally losing that pesky 30 pounds that have lingered on me for WAY TOO LONG. One of the ways I plan on kicking that weight to the curb (besides kicking my emotional eating habit) is by enjoying delicious soups and salads at night time. I’m trying to eat my larger meals earlier in the day and then lighter meals closer to dinner time.
Butternut squash seemed like a great soup to add to my soup rotation and the batch I made was DELICIOUS! If you don’t have a butternut squash randomly in the house, you’ll find yourself going to the grocery store to pick them up. I Googled the average price for a butternut squash and it’s around $1.69 (ish) the batch I made will equal 4 servings for me.
Ibotta
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Related Post: 12 Kitchen Gadget to Change Your Cooking Life
The Ingredients
Here is the list of ingredients. You’ll notice that I don’t do perfect measurements. Don’t freak, you’ll be able to make this recipe.
- 1 Butternut Squash
- 1/2 can of Coconut Milk (I prefer the one with more fat-not the lite option)
- 1/2 a veggie Bouillon cube or 1/2 tsp of Better Than Bouillon
- 1 1/2 cups of water (you may want to start with less and then add more. I live at a higher altitude and that affects the amount of liquid that I add to my recipes) I like the soup thick not runny, so f.y.i.
- 1 red apple, one of the sweeter ones. If you don’t have red, use the apple that you have at your house. Don’t sweat this.
- 1/2 a Cinnamon stick, a pinch of nutmeg (optional), a pinch of fennel (optional)
Let’s Do This
I decided to roast the squash and apple the day before and that made assembling the soup MUCH easier and faster. I would recommend doing that versus roasting the day you plan on eating the soup.
- Rinse the squash and make sure it’s clean
- You’ll see a round brown area on the bottom of the squash. Use a knife to make 4 slices in that area (basically, make an X so that as you roast the squash it doesn’t explode) Not sure what I mean? Check out the following blog post: How to Cook Butternut Squash it was the post that I checked out before I started.
- Butternut Squash-Set your oven to 400 degrees (Fahrenheit) and then put the squash in an unlined or lined baking dish. Bake for 1 hour or 1 hour and 15 minutes. When it’s done it will look brown and wrinkly 🙂 And, it will be super tender. Let it cook off before working with it. I do this the day before I plan on eating the soup or on meal prep day.
- Roast the apple next-When your butternut squash has been in the oven for about 45 minutes, add your washed and cut up apple (don’t worry about how it’s cut up-just cut it up into random cubes) onto the same baking dish as your squash. You’ll let it roast at the same time. The apple only needs about 20 minutes to roast so f.y.i. I do this the day before I plan on eating the soup or on meal prep day.
- Make the Veggie Broth-Get a small pot and add the water and bouillon. Let the water come to a boil. Once it boils-turn off the water. I also like to add my cinnamon stick to the water. You can also add the coconut milk to the water after you’ve turned it off. This can be done the day before or day of. If you do it the day before, just but the broth in the fridge.
- Cut the cooled off Butternut Squash-You will cut the squash in half. Refer to the blog post mentioned above if you’re wondering how that should look. Scrap out the seeds and the stringy stuff. I kept and cleaned the seeds because I plan on roasting them later. Once you’ve removed the seeds and stringy stuff, scrape out the squash. Store half of the squash in the fridge. The other half will be for the soup. Again, I do this the day before I plan on eating the soup or on meal prep day.
- Add the squash, apple, veggie broth, and coconut milk together. Bring to a boil. Remove the cinnamon stick. If you forgot-no worries.
- Let the mixture cool off (important!) at least 15 minutes. Then, add it to your high speed blender. I have a Vitamix, but, this soup’s texture won’t be negatively affected by the blender that you use.
I love my Vitamix 🙂
- Soup’s ready! You may need to reheat it a little bit-but, that’s it.
This soup was freaking DELICIOUS!!! No weird ingredients, extremely fast to put together after the squash is roasted. And super affordable if you’re on a tight budget.
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