Winter Squash Soup

We've been just throwing together quick meals or eating soup this week, so what I have to show is two quick-to-make soups. Here's the first one.

 

Winter squash, potato, and chicken soup

It was pretty simple, I still had chard from the week before and needed to do something with it, so I decided soup was my best option. I started with browning the potatoes in a large ceramic coated cast iron pot.

When they were just about done I added some fresh minced garlic from my CSA box. Once the garlic was nicely toasted I thought it looked kind of plain and got the idea of adding the winter squash since I had never done anything with one. Everything is good in soup, right? It was a bear to cube so next time I think I'll bake it for a bit before adding it. That looked much better, gave the soup a bit of color. Time to season! I used salt and pepper, italian seasonings, some dried basil, and dried parsley. This is also when I added my broth. I had some turkey broth left over so I used that, but chicken broth is just as good. If it's storebought I do recommend low sodium, otherwise it's just too salty.

The meat I used was leftover chicken from the night before which is why this dish was so quick to throw together. If I didn't have any leftover chicken I would have cooked it in the pot first, set it aside, and then continued with the soup. Here is where I added in the chicken, let it warm back up and at the last minute the chopped chard went in to get a bit wilty. It was nice to have for these cold winter days and Matt loves taking comfort type food to work for his lunches. Neither of us were fans of sweet squash previously, but we liked it this way! I still have one left to figure out what to do with....