The easiest butternut squash soup ever with the Instant Pot electric pressure cooker

Butternut squash soup is one of the things I love eating but normally I find kind of a pain to make. You have to cut up (which is hard!) and cook the squash, and them puree it. It's kind of a hassle.

However, using my instant pot electric pressure cooker to cook the squash makes the process so much easier! I can make it on a weeknight now! It's healthy, delicious and now easy.

Ingredients:
~2lb butternut squash
3/4 cup heavy cream
32 oz low sodium chicken broth, divided
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Equipment:
6 qt instant pot electric pressure cooker
Immersion blender (I have this one) or you can use a food processor, but an immersion blender will make it easier

Directions:
Cut your squash into fourths, so it will fit in your pressure cooker and cook more easily. Remove the seeds. Pour one cup of water into your pressure cooker pot and place your trivet in the bottom, place squash on top. Close top and close vent. Pressure cook on manual high for 12 minutes. When cooking time is completed quick release the pressure.

Squash ready for cooking

Remove the squash from the pot and dump out the water. Allow the squash to cool slightly, until you can handle it. Pour about half the chicken broth, the cream and all of the seasonings into the pressure cooker pot and set the cooker to the saute, less (ie the lower temp, on my IP it's called "less").

Cooked squash

Scoop the squash out of the peel and return it to the pot. Using your immersion blender, puree the squash in the pot, adding additional chicken stock until it reaches desired consistency. Depending on the exact size of your squash, you may not need the entire container. Continue blending until the soup is smooth. Makes 4-6 entree sized servings.

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How to cook an almost whole butternut squash in your instant pot

I love butternut squash (see past recipe butternut squash soup here) but I absolutely hate cutting it up. It's hard, especially peeling it. Making it in the instant pot or other electric pressure cooker, you don't have to peel it! It's amazing.

It doesn't quite have the flavor of an oven roasted butternut but it's still pretty good and it's prefect to use for soups or twice baked or just eating on it's own. It's so healthy and easy.

Too big for the pot!

You can put it in your instant pot without peeling it but you need to cut it up enough so it fits inside. For my 6qt pot, I had to cut mine in fourths. I don't recommend putting it in whole, even if it fits because it won't cook very evenly.

I had one small area where my squash was thick that wasn't cooked all the way after my cook time, if you have a thicker squash, add 1-2 minutes. After this trial, I have suggested 13 minute cook time (I had tried 12 minutes). Or use a few minutes of natural pressure release (ie let the pressure come down without opening the valve) if you have a thick squash.

Ready to go!

Directions:
Cut squash into fourths and clean out the seeds. Place trivet in bottom of instant pot and pour in 1 cup of water. Place your squash on the trivet and close the lid. Set instant pot for high pressure, 13 minute cook time. Make sure the valve is set to sealing. After the cook time has finished you can do a quick pressure release by opening the valve. The overall cooking time including for the pot to get to pressure is about 20 minutes.

**If you have a thicker than normal squash, you can add 1-2 minutes cooking time or allow it to do a natural pressure release for a few minutes so it cooks a little bit more. Be advised 2 minutes is a lot in pressure cooker time!

Now you have a perfectly cooked squash with very little fuss!

You can scoop it out eat it as it is (yum!) or use it, for example, for a butternut squash soup! Just remove the squash from your pot. Pour out the water from the bottom and remove the trivet. Scoop the squash back into the instant pot and turn on the saute function and follow this recipe as if you were on the stove top.

Pumpkin cupcakes with buttercream icing

It is officially Fall. Alright, it's been Fall for a while but the weather has been surprisingly warm during early Fall in DC so I wasn't feeling very Autumnal. However, that has changed now and I'm ready to bake with pumpkin, make butternut squash soup and drink hot coca!

Plus I've been seeing pumpkin recipes on Pinterest since at least July.

Pumpkin Cupcakes
adapted from Martha Stewart's pumpkin cupcakes

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon coarse salt
1 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup packed light-brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 can (15 ounces) pumpkin puree

 

Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In large mixing bowl, combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly (be sure the butter mixed in well). Fill  muffin cups with paper liners and then fill 1/3 full with batter. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Makes 2 dozen.

Buttercream icing

Ingredients*

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened

2-3 cups of powdered sugar, divided

1 tsp vanilla extract

In medium mixing bowl, beat the stick of butter, 1 cup of powdered sugar and the vanilla until well mixed. While mixing, add additional powdered sugar until it reaches the desired sweetness.

*Note: You can also add 1-2 Tb of heavy cream to get a fluffier icing

These cupcakes were amazing. I already want to make more. The biggest compliment was my boyfriend (who doesn't eat) eating 3 before 1pm. My biggest mistake was taking them to work and giving a bunch away instead of eating them all myself. Unfortunately the photos did not turn out well but trust me - they were so, so good.

Grandma's Apple Pie

Making a pie from scratch has been a goal of mine for a long time and I've finally done it!

I started out by looking at apple pie recipes online and they looked very complicated...one said I needed to refrigerate the crust dough for 4 hours or ideally overnight! I called my grandma and she set me on the right track. Grandma says that refrigerating the dough is completely unnecessary and her pie crust had 4 ingredients and one of them is water. The one I was looking at online had at least 8 - yeah, Grandma's won.

Ingredients

Pie crust
2 cup flour
4 Tb butter or crisco (grandma says a "good Tb" so you might toss in a little extra)
1 tsp of salt
1 tsp cinnamon *I added this because I'm making apple pie
water, as needed (approx 2 Tb)

Filling
6 apples, cored, sliced
1/2 cup of sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
Additional 2 Tb of sugar

Equipment
Pie plate, 10"
Aluminum foil
Rolling pin

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix salt, cinnamon and flour together, cut in butter. Add enough water to moisten the crust as you work it into dough. Kneed for 5-10 minutes. Take half of the dough and roll it out (using a little flour) until it's about 1/4 in thick and place it in the bottom of a greased pie plate. The bottom crust should go up the sides of the plate, trim any excess away.

Place sliced apples in a medium sized pot with 2 Tb of sugar and enough water to cover the apples. Cook on medium heat for about 10 minutes. Drain any excess liquid and allow to cool. Mix the 1/2 cup of sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg with the apples and place them in the pie plate.

Roll the second half dough out until it's a 1/4 in thick. Place on top of the pie plate and press around the edges to seal with the bottom crust. cover the edges of the pie with foil (or a pie shield if you have one) Bake at 350 degrees for 45-60 minutes, removing the foil for the last 15 minutes.

Butternut squash soup - perfect winter dinner

Butternut squash soup might be the easiest soup to make in the world. Alright, it does make a few more dishes than I'm normally on board with but it might just be worth it. This soup has some wonderful fall flavors with apple, nutmeg and cinnamon.

I had a stray squash in the fridge, which I really needed to use and I was getting ready to head out of town but what to make? I was just getting over a cold, so it was feeling like a soup kind of day. Soup seems to be the standard thing to make with butternut squash, so since I'd never done it, the time seemed ripe! Pun totally intended.

I started browsing some recipes and they all seemed pretty similar, differing a little in their spice pallet but the gist was - cut up squash and boil in chicken broth before pureeing with whatever else you decide to put in there with it. This is what I came up with:

1 medium butternut squash
1 apple (I used 1.5 small gala apples)
2 cubes of chicken bullion
3 oz cream cheese
dash of nutmeg
dash of cinnamon
dash of salt

Equipment: food processor or blender

Cube the squash (tip) and core and dice the apples. Place squash and apples in large sauce pan with bullion and just enough water to cover the contents. Boil for 20 minutes or until squash is tender. Spoon cooked squash mixture into food processor with a sloted spoon, add cream cheese, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt and  blend until smooth. If you would like a thinner soup, add cooking liquid and blend until soup reaches desired consistency.  Makes 3 large bowls.

Be careful not to be too heavy handed with the spices, I put a dash because I think even a 1/2 tsp will be too much.

I will definitely be making this again and again all winter long, this soup was tasty. It does make some dishes, mostly because of the food processor but it's worth it. How else can you make a delicious soup in under 30 minutes? Also, it's ridiculously healthy and low in calories.

Late photo - Thanksgiving feast

I have been a supreme slacker on blogging. To be honest, I haven't been cooking very much either! However, my friend Kim (who just moved to DC!) and I did prepare a feast on Thanksgiving! See below two (very tardy) photos.

The ham was made by slicing a smoked ham partially apart and putting brown sugar in each slot. The toothpicks are holding small bits of apple and pineapple each. My grandma advised that using apple and pineapple adds a slightly different flavor. It was a tasty ham (made in the crock pot) but I'm not sure it's the best it could be. If anyone makes this for Christmas, be sure to let me know how you like the addition of apple!

The other photos shows part of the feast - green beans with blanched almonds, mashed potatoes, gravy (instant, sadly) and stuffing. We also had apple and pumpkin pie (both made from scratch by Kim!), turkey breast (small group), garlic biscuits, cheeses and any number of other yummy things.

Ham in the crock pot!

Just some of the Thanksgiving feast!

Pumpkin nut bars

Around my forth bite of the persimmon nut bars I made recently, I thought, "hmmm...these are really tasty, but the persimmon flavor isn't quite strong enough, I bet they would be yummy with another kind of fruit."

A few days later, I had just been to the grocery store, and excited to see pumpkin was back in stock after the fall harvest, I had bought 3 cans, without any direct intention of how to use them. It was an impulse buy, like gum at the cash register or big blocks of feta cheese.

The fates coincided. I would make pumpkin flavored [persimmon] bars. I decided to double the recipe and make a 9x13 pan of said bars because I had a friend who'd be coming to stay in a few days and I thought it would be nice to have something to feed her. And I like pumpkin, have I mentioned this?

I start mixing up my ingredients and realize I'm just tad short of almost everything essential to make a double batch. I needed 1 cup vegetable oil and had to use about a 1/4 cup of olive oil to make it. I was almost a whole cup shy of flour and tossed in some bread flour, not really sure what the difference was and what the consequences might be. I also noticed half way through that I made a serious judgement mistake in trying to make the persimmon bars with pumpkin puree. Anyone see it? Yea the texture of the two is totally different. I thought with the spices it would be a nice flavor combo but I probably should have looked up a pumpkin bar recipe, batter was very cake-like. I even put in some extra (bread) flour. But I baked it anyway. What's the worse that can happen? Already used all the ingredients, might as well go all the way!

Results? Pumpkin cake. So not bars, but very moist and fluffy pumpkin cake. It also made a ton, I've been eating it for days and still have some, plus I put a fair amount in the freezer. So sometimes the random experiments work! But I still probably need to learn to check my ingredients before I start.

Twice baked butternut mousse

It's officially fall. I'm buying butternut squash and thinking about recipes for pumpkin...though canned pumpkin is still in short supply. Come on harvest! Aside from the food, I'm not ready for the cold weather, but I digress.

My mom makes an excellent twice baked potato. So I was thinking, why not try a twice baked butternut squash? Yummy.

Ingredients

1 butternut squash (I think mine was 2lbs)

8 oz cream cheese (spreadable)

1/2 cup seasoned bread crumbs

salt

pepper

Equipment

Hand mixer

Slice squash in half, remove seeds and fibers. Place in a pan with 1/4 inch of water in the bottom, season squash lightly with salt and pepper, cover with aluminum foil and bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes or until squash is tender. Allow cooked squash to cool, and remove cooked flesh from peel and place in medium size mixing bowl. Using hand mixer, blend cream cheese with squash. Put squash mixture in baking dish and sprinkle with bread crumbs. Bake at 350 for an additional 20-25 minutes.

This turned our pretty well considering I kinda winged it, though I had my doubts at times. It was very rich and had a creamy texture. I might work with it a little more and try to get the consistency to be a bit more firm like a twice baked potato, maybe I need to bake it longer the second time or less the first time, I'm not sure. I'll be honest, after mixing the squash with cream cheese it kinda looked like baby food...so a little firmer of a texture would be an improvement!

Finally, Pumpkin!

Well it's about time. I was seriously considering taking the metro to another grocery store because the one by my apartment did not have any pumpkin and then finally on Thursday, success! I've been there so often this week, I'm surprised none of the employees thought I was stalking them. I bought two cans, just to be safe. You never know when there might be a pumpkin emergency.

I actually bought the Libby's easy pumpkin pie mix because I thought the recipe called for cloves (it doesn't) and they were out! (What is wrong with this grocery store?) But this is probably best as I now am looking at recipes for pumpkin cheesecake and muffins...and did I mention that pumpkin pie is my favorite?

So I get ready to bake and realize I also needed buttermilk, which I did not buy...I go back to the store (I swear the manager mumbled something about a "restraining order") to get my buttermilk. What else could go wrong? Well, I was about 1/2 a cup short of brown sugar, so I had to supplement with some granulated sugar. So, I mix up the ingredients and am about to pour it in the pans and I realize I forgot to put in the butter, it's still sitting there on the cabinet. sigh. I'm once again ready to pour the batter into the pan and my mom calls, totally distracting me and I almost forgot to grease the pan! yikes.


But I finally have some pumpkin bread! And it's really tasty. One loaf to eat this week for breakfast and one to put in the freezer for later, which I made mostly so I wouldn't waste so much pumpkin and buttermilk.


See the recipe I used here.

Taste: B+
Cost: B
Waste: B+ (buttermilk)

What does fall mean? Butternut squash!

I don't like to be cold, so I'm not a fall fan, but I absolutely LOVE butternut squash. It's so sweet and delicious. I also like that it's something that is really only available when it's in season, it gives me something to look forward to, but a lot of butternut recipes are for soup. Eh, not such a fan here, I'm always looking for other uses and I love that too - there are possibilities out there, I just gotta look for them!

So I'm sharing one of my favorite butternut recipes. I like it for several reasons (not a soup!), it's versatile - can be an entree or a side and you can make as much or as little as you want, perfect for a single girl.

Ingredients:

Butternut squash, cut into 1" cubes
Olive oil
Thyme
bread crumbs (seasoned or plain)
Feta cheese (can use blue cheese or mozzarella, gorgonzola would probably work too, I like feta)
salt and pepper

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Place butternut cubes in a non-stick baking dish Coat butternut cubes lightly in olive oil (not too much, will make it greasy), sprinkle thyme on the cubes when mixing the oil on them. Sprinkle cheese on top (for 3-4 cups of butternut cubes, I use about 1/3 cup of cheese, this will make it pretty cheesy)or you can try to mix it in a little so it's in the middle and top. Next sprinkle a little salt and pepper (to taste) and about 2 tablespoons of bread crumbs on top. Bake approximately 30-40 minutes or until squash is soft.

To cut cost, I often use a little bit of feta and supplement with some mozzarella.

See the photo of the finished product above...you'll notice part of it is already gone, yea sorry about that I was really hungry and kind of forgot to take a photo first. This will likely be a reoccurring theme.

One thing I don't like about butternut - otherwise it would be a perfect love affair - it's a pain in the rear to cut up. I advise a sharp knife and to be careful. I'm not sure if this is because I'm not buying the right ripeness, sometimes it seems easier than others but if you have any tips, I'd be glad to hear them.

Do you have any butternut recipes you'd like to share? I want to hear 'em! If yours sounds yummy, I will try to make it and post it on the blog.

Cost: A
Waste: A+
Taste: A