If you make one soup this fall, it should probably be this one. The recipe appeared on my Facebook feed Saturday morning and I immediately said out loud, “Oh I have to make this tonight!” I love curry, and I love cumin – and these flavors were big players in this soup. It was beautiful, too:

Here is the recipe we followed: Curry Sage Butternut Squash Soup.

This is not your average soup recipe. The flavors and garnishes really make it a complete meal, at least in my book. The great thing about this recipe is that even though the flavors are complex, the recipe is easy. The only thing you need that the average person might not have is a food processor, blender, immersion blender or Vitamix. (Basically something to purée the ingredients to a smooth consistency.)

We started off by cutting our butternut squash in half, putting it face side down on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and coating it lightly with olive oil. Then it roasted in the oven for 35 minutes at 400 degrees. While the butternut squash was roasting, I cut up the shallot, garlic, washed the butternut squash seeds and got seeds toasting in the pan. I loved toasting the seeds with cumin, coriander (cumin is my favorite spice) and sea salt. This gave the seeds an amazing flavor. I snacked on them while I was making the soup.

The olive oil also gave the seeds a great taste.

Once the seeds were done cooking, I started on the sage. One of my college friends recently fell in love with fried sage. It is a heavenly thing – especially in the fall as a garnish for a recipe like this! I didn’t want to put too much oil in the pan, so I carefully got the sage leaves cooking…

My method actually worked out well. (You’ll just have to take my word for it 😉 )

After all of the prepping for the other aspects of the soup, the butter nut squash was almost ready to come out of the oven. I started cooking the shallots, and then basically followed the recipe the whole time. I added a little more cumin than it called for… and a little more madras curry powder. (1/4 of a teaspoon more) My justification for this is that the butternut squash we were using was three pounds and not two…. and we like spicy / flavorful foods!

As the pot cooked away, we tasted it a couple of times to make sure the flavors were working well together. Of course they were! The soup smelled amazing as it was cooking. We could not get over what a beautiful aroma was filling the kitchen and the living room as we cooked. It was a quenticential October night. The Red Sox were playing in the ALCS playoffs, and we were making an amazing meal for the cool, drizzly night ahead. Perfection!

Once it was time to purée the soup, we figured out a good method. The food processor right next to the stove, a glass bowl to transfer the already puréed soup into, and it all worked like a well oiled machine:

We puréed the soup in three batches, I think. If you are doing this for the first time – remember, look at the “liquid fill line” on your food processor and do not fill it past that line – especially important when the liquid is hot. The food processor did a fantastic job.

We also had crusty bread and a nice bottle of pinot noir to go with the soup.

No, we did not eat all of the bread. But the bread was a perfect accompaniment for dinner – a rosemary olive oil bread from Wegman’s. (The only bread we buy there, basically.)

One the recipe was finished (we used half and half instead of heavy cream at the end), I plated things up and put in the garnishes. It was such a lovely dish. We both had seconds.

I do not think I can express how much we really loved this soup. But if you like curry, butternut squash, cumin, and autumn, you really need to give this soup a try the next time you need something to warm you up. After an afternoon walk in the mist, this worked like a charm!

This is definitely what I am having for lunch in just a few minutes…. Make it and enjoy!