The first time in my life that I ate butternut soup was on my 21st birthday. I never had an end of school education celebration due to the fact that I didn’t finish school – this in itself is a story for another time. My mother decided to celebrate my 21ste birthday as a celebration of my life, which the enemy tried to rob many times. She decorated the house and bought me a beautiful dress and then she hired caterers for the evening. On the menu was butternut soup. It was absolutely delicious! So this soup is more a fond memory then just a recipe.
Ok I will come right out and say this, there are very few times that we follow the recipe exactly. Many times we just guess the amounts without weighing it out exactly.
What you need
- 5 kg butternut
- 4 x 200g Granny Smith apples
- 2 x 100g chopped onions
- 1 Cup of orange juice
- 2 packs of cream of chicken soup
- 2 l of milk
- Salt and pepper
- 3 teaspoons of Curry powder
- A half a teaspoon of chicken spice
- 250ml mayonnaise
- 250ml cream
We have found that butternut is a hard vegetable to peel and cut, so we prefer to wrap up the whole butternut in foil and roast it in the oven until it is soft. Once it has cooled down enough that we can handle it, we remove it from the foil and remove the skin and seeds and then mash it. We also feel this enhances the flavour instead of boiling cut pieces of butternut in water. You can do it either way you want.
Peel the apples and cut and core them. Peel and cut the onions into pieces and boil it together with the apples until it is very soft. Then drain off the water.
Like many of our adventures in the kitchen, Jacques does certain things while I do others. This way we work together seamlessly. Jacques blends together the butternut and some of the milk until it is nice and smooth. He then continues to blend the soft boiled apples, onions with the orange juice until it is a nice fine pulp texture. We often use a bit more orange juice than what the recipe calls for.
I heat the the rest of the milk, curry powder, chicken soup powder, salt and pepper together until everything is combined. As I said, we don’t really follow the precise recipe and most time we have more butternut than we should so we then add a liter or two of chicken stock as well. Then we add the butternut, apple, onion, orange juice pulp with the milk and spices.
Heat up everything together making sure that it is a nice smooth texture. We sometimes blend everything a bit more in the pot with a stick blender. Then we add the mayonnaise and cream into the soup, making sure everything is combined well.
Again presentation is key so we like to serve the soup with some dried pumpkin seeds on top of each bowl.
This recipe goes very well with some of our homemade breads.
