Rich and Creamy Butternut Squash Soup with Spinach and It's Official! Binge Eating Disorder Recognized by the APA

This year is the first year that I haven't stopped going to our local farmer's market as soon as the weather turned cold. A few weeks ago I picked up a gigantic butternut squash not sure what I was going to do with it.

A lot of ideas came together to inspire the soup that resulted. A butternut squash soup recipe from Thrive Foods by Brendan Brazier, The Healthy Librarian's faux coconut milk, the spinach in my fridge that I wanted to use up, and my sheer love of anything with curry powder.

The results were fantastic. So rich and creamy and soul satisfying for such an easy recipe.

HGK's Rich and Creamy Butternut Squash Soup with Spinach

serves 8

Printable Recipe

5 pounds whole butternut squash

6 cups unsweetened almond milk

2 Tbsp coconut extract

1 tsp curry powder

2 cups vegetable broth

fresh baby spinach

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil or parchment paper.

Cut off the ends of the squash and discard. Cut squash in half lengthwise and remove seeds. Place halved squash, cut side down, on lined tray. Roast squash in oven for about 1 hour until largest squash is soft throughout.

Let squash cool so that you can handle it. Remove  all of the flesh from the squash and place it into a large dutch oven or soup pot. Add almond milk, coconut extract, vegetable broth and curry powder. Over medium-high heat, bring mixture to a simmer, stirring occasionally until heated through.

Turn heat to low. Using an immersion blender, process soup until smooth.

Add handfuls of fresh baby spinach and stir. Add more spinach until soup reaches the proportion of soup to spinach that you like.

Taste. Add salt (or not) and more curry powder (to taste). Thin with vegetable broth if consistency us to thick for your taste.

Next up on my winter squash to experiment with list? Delicata. Got some at the Farmer's Market this week and wondering what to do with it. Do you have any ideas?

I also want to point out this very interesting article on binge eating disorder. It brings up a lot of excellent points like the linkage between "dieting" (not to be confused with healthy eating) and binge eating, which is an idea that completely rings true for me. It also points out that "The APA [American Psychiatric Association] will include BED [binge eating disorder] as a separate disorder in the fifth edition of its “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” referred to as the DSM-V.

Oh great, dieting made me crazy. Certifiably so.

Thoughts?