It’s Halloween so it seemed apt to have butternut squash soup for dinner tonight (also known as butternut pumpkin in Australia). Lately I’ve been thinking it might be worthwhile to share cheap meal ideas since so many people are struggling with bills right now.
It’s not hard to feed a family of four on a budget if you stick with plants. Butternuts are particularly good because they’re so big and you can pick one up at Sainsburys for £1.25. That’s dinner for a family of four right there. I adapt a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s Great Britain called Roasted Apple and Butternut Squash Soup. He roasts the butternut but I can’t be bothered doing that.
Here’s my version of it.
Ingredients
1 butternut squash (or butternut pumpkin)
3 apples
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
sprinkling of chilli flakes depending on how spicy you like it
1 tsp dried rosemary
800ml vegetable stock or just water if you don’t have stock
1/2 cup ground cashew nuts (this is optional but makes it extra hearty and creamy)
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
Pepper to taste
Put all ingredients in a pot except cashews and simmer until the squash and apples are soft then mash them up with a hand blender. Stir in the cashews and serve with warm bread or toast.
Just around the corner from us someone left a box of very large cooking apples on the street for people to take. It’s apple season and I guess they had too many so we got the apples for free and they’re particularly good. I also make my own bread which is cheaper and tastier. The only thing we had to buy for this meal was the £1.25 butternut squash since all the other things were already in our pantry.
On Sunday we went to a local church where they had some exotic animals including a tarantula, a corn snake, a bearded dragon, a scorpion, and Madagascan hissing cockroaches. The bearded dragon is what I used to call a lizard growing up in Australia. He was sat at the very end (on the far right of this next photo) letting a huge queue of children stroke him. I asked the fellow why he didn’t run away and apparently he was sitting on a heat pack and so not keen to move from that spot.
When you shine an ultraviolet light on a scorpion it glows like this next photo. It’s apparently to attract insects.
rachel.blog 
Thanks for the recipe – first time I’ve heard of putting apples in with pumpkin soup. Keen to give a try 🙂
It’s delicious!
I made pumpkin soup with a thing that looked like a butternut, but more like a rugby ball. It was a much more watery vegetable than I expected, I panicked and threw in some apples as I had read your post, it turned out OK! Our local shop sells so many different types of squashes, I find it’s hit and miss what the flesh inside is like.