Butternut Squash Soup With Apples and Bacon

Creamy butternut squash soup is the perfect cold weather meal. This simple, warming dish is homey and comforting enough for a weeknight family meal but special enough to serve as an appetizer during the holidays. Here’s more good news: This entire recipe can also be made in one large pot. You start by rendering the fat from some bacon, then sauté diced celery, carrot, and yellow onion in that fat before adding the squash and some chicken broth. (We also add potato and green apple to make the soup even more flavorful.) Once the ingredients are cooked, you can blend everything with an immersion blender right in the soup pot or transfer it to a standing blender in batches. Serve the soup sprinkled with crispy bacon and slivered raw apple.

This easy butternut squash soup recipe is gluten-free and dairy-free (if you skip the sour cream topper); you don’t need heavy cream, or even coconut milk, since the blended squash is rich enough all on its own. While you can technically eat the peel of butternut squash, we remove it before we make butternut squash soup to preserve that creamy texture. (Peeling squash is pretty easy to do with a standard vegetable peeler, but you can also buy cubed, precut squash at the market to cut down on your prep time.) The base recipe is flexible enough to pair with a variety of flavor profiles, so feel free to play around with it; add some garlic cloves to the onion, sprinkle in a hint of cayenne pepper for some heat, or add some toasted pumpkin seeds and black pepper to the garnish.