Autumn isn’t autumn without Butternut Squash Soup. But before I leave you with my favorite fall recipe, I want to reconnect. Our harvest was overwhelming this year in a good way. After several years of disappointing crops, this year our orchard went wild. We harvested more stone fruit than we ever have before and worked our behinds off.

Due to the COVID-19 quarantine, we opened a farmstand on our property. We live out in the country and I didn’t think very many people would drive out to visit us, but they did. Fridays on the farm became a new part of our summer routine.

There’s nothing fancy about our farm stand. We put some tables under an old horse shed and let folks park in the orchard. It brought back all the feels of when I was a kid working at my grandparents’ fruit stand on their peach farm. Sometimes you just have to return to good, old-fashioned ground you know and love, that’s what we did this year. I also signed books in an orchard for the first time ever and even put on some lipstick.

Because of the quarantine, we didn’t get to do any book parties when my latest novel Leaving Lonesome released at the end of June, so we set up a table, and along with selling fruit in our orchard, I signed books. It was sweet and fun and I sold out of copies of Lonesome pretty quickly, considering it was hard to even get author copies due to the pandemic. I’m so grateful readers are liking the story and the novel is getting good reviews on Amazon. If you haven’t gotten the book yet and want to, head on over to Amazon by tapping this link: Leaving Lonesome.

So about that recipe I promised you, as I write this post, I can smell the butternut squash baking in my kitchen. As soon as I say goodbye, I’ll be making my favorite soup and sharing it with my family. All of our kids and Scott adore my butternut squash soup. I hope your family enjoys it too. Happy Autumn friends! If you’d like some more farm recipes sign up for my newsletter and you should find them in your inbox soon.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP

Wash four small to medium butternut squashes. Pat dry and poke with a fork. You want to make a handful of holes in each squash so they don’t explode on you in the oven as they cook.

Spray a baking pan with Pam spray or grease with your choice of product. This helps the squash not stick to the pan. Bake at 400 degrees until Squash softens. This is about an hour of baking.

When squash is soft, remove from oven and cut each squash in half. Scoop out the seeds. Line half squashes in a baking dish with sides. You don’t want leakage from your dish so don’t use your flat baking pan. Now add dabs of butter onto squash halves and sprinkle with brown sugar. I like plenty of brown sugar but use as much sugar as you prefer. Return to the oven and bake until the squash is soft and easy to scoop out of the shell. I let squash cool on the counter for a while before scooping out the squash meat. Discard the shell.

Get out your blender. Add squash meat to the blender and then add chicken broth and heavy whipping cream. I add about a cup of chicken broth and a cup of cream per one squash but you can do less cream and more broth for a lighter soup. Blend this together, add salt and pepper to taste, and then pour contents into a saucepan and heat on the stovetop. This is one serving. To make four servings of soup, I do this four times.

Serve with toast, crackers, or crusty french bread. Enjoy! Just like our youngest boys here are enjoying our new farm pool.