A SEASON FOR SOUPS

I was trying to think of different creative things to do with my Boston Organics order and I came up with the idea of making a potato-squash-cheddar soup. Kinda like a cross between a butternut squash soup and a potato cheddar soup, but with the addition of sweet potato squash. I would've loved to have photographed the whole process for you, but after the second pic, I realized that I was running low on batteries. And since i wanted to give you all a pic of the final product, I decided to save the batteries for this last photo. Here's my soup below.
Also, i didn't follow a recipe. I kinda made it up as i went along. to be honest, once you've made one soup and gotten down the basics, it's not that hard to make another soup.

So here's what i did. I first infused some hot olive oil with fresh thyme. Be careful when you do this, cause I learned that thyme burns pretty damn quickly. (unlike the rosemary i used for my mushroom soup.) then i threw in a random assortment of chopped garlic and shallots. Meanwhile, i prepped the sweet potato squash by cutting it in half, scooping out the seeds and sprinkling it with olive oil, salt and pepper. That and the butternut squash (that'd already been cleaned, courtesy of russo's) went into a 425F oven. Here's the sweet potato squash:
Back to the thyme, shallots and garlic. I cubed up my potatoes and sauteed those in the olive oil until they were cooked, but still firm. Here they are below:
I removed half of the cubes and set them aside. Then I added in 3 cans of chicken broth and let the whole thing summer while waiting for my squash to cook. When the sweet potato squash was cooked until soft, i chopped it up and tossed it into the chicken broth. With the butternut squash, i cooked it until it was still a bit firm, and then cut that into cubes and put it aside. Now that everything was soft (potato, butternut squash and sweet potato squash) I took out my handblender and pureed it all until it was smooth. I grated 8 oz. of cheddar cheese and tossed that in and i finished it all off by returning the cubed potatoes and butternut squash to the soup.

So how'd it all turn out? well, that squash really sweetend the soup a lot more than i thought it would and also masked the flavor of the cheese. so i added more salt and i think i should've used less squash. otherwise, it turned out to be a pretty tasty soup. I liked the chunks of potato and butternut squash, cause i'm a big fan of textures. so next time you're given a sweet potato squash, try to be creative and come up with your own squash soup.