Fall has....Fallen

Okay. I will say it out loud (or at least type it on a screen). Fall is officially here. I'm not talking about when the calendar marks the arrival of Fall. I'm talking about the day on the calendar when I finally give up on trying to prolong summer by wearing my flip flops and shorts and admit that perhaps it's time to bring out the sweaters and boots. I'm talking about the time when I stop craving salads and start hungering for a nice, filling hot bowl of soup or stew. Yesterday was that day.

I traveled out to our local farm stand to pick up some pumpkins to arrange on the front porch and I was totally overwhelmed by the huge bins of fall and winter squash; butternut, acorn, hubbard, spaghetti, turban. The colors and shapes were much more interesting than the blah old zucchini and yellow squash of summer so I chose a butternut and an acorn squash. Of course, my family are not squash eaters so I knew I'd have to work pretty hard to find something to fix that they would eat.

Since I was in the mood for soup, I went searching for a recipe for butternut squash soup. Of course there are hundreds, but I narrowed it down to three and combined them all into one new recipe. My favorite chef in the world, Michael Chiarello, from my favorite place in the world, the Napa Valley, has a recipe for Roasted Butternut squash soup which looked promising but roasting anything in my oven at more than 400 degrees results in a smoke-filled kitchen (since I don't have an exhaust fan over my stove) and I wasn't keen on opening the windows to disperse the smoke so the smoke detectors wouldn't go off. But I did take away one of the ingredients that he used in his soup that I didn't find in the other two recipes - a cinnamon stick. The second recipe featured baking the squash (along with a whole onion and a bulb of garlic) in a 350 degree oven while the third recipe (an extremely simple one) called for cooking the squash in chicken broth with the carrots, celery and a diced potato.
So I used the oven baking method, along with the really simple recipe and tossed in Chef Chiarello's cinnamon stick (and a little nutmeg) and came up with my own creation. I'm going to enjoy it with a thick slice of homemade honey white bread that I baked yesterday that filled my kitchen with the smells of fall. Okay...maybe fall isn't so bad after all.

Ingredients
1 medium butternut squash - peeled, seeded and cubed
1 medium unpeeled onion
1 small garlic bulb
3-4 tablespoons of olive oil
1 tablespoon of dried thyme
2 tablespoons of butter
1 stalk of celery, chopped
1 medium carrot, chopped
2 medium potatoes, diced
1 cinnamon stick
1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
1 32oz container of chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste

For the squash:
Place cubed squash, the onion and the garlic bulb on a baking sheet. Drizzle the squash with olive oil and toss to coat. Drizzle the onion and garlic with olive oil.  Sprinkle squash, onion and garlic with the dried thyme. Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil and bake in a 350 degree oven for about 40 minutes or until squash is fork tender. Uncover and let stand until lukewarm.

Directions
1. Melt the butter in a large stockpot and cook the carrots, celery, potatoes, nutmeg and the cinnamon stick until the vegetables are lightly browned. Pour in enough of the chicken stock to cover the vegetables and cook for about 15 minutes or until fork tender.
2. Remove the skin from the onion and remove the soft garlic from the skins and add to the vegetable mixture.
3. Add the cubed squash to the vegetable mixture and stir until combined.
4. Transfer the mixture to a blender and blend until smooth.
5. Return the mixture to the pot and mix in the remaining stock to attain the desired soup consistency. Season with salt and pepper to taste.