Butternut squash - I Love you

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

Ludwig van Beethoven 

Okay so I've been home in Ireland a few months now and what I've really noticed is that our favorite meal time over here is lunch time, for one simple reason; Soup. Soup is probably the most consumed lunchtime meal by us Irish folk and for good reason. Its easy to make, ridiculously delicious and most importantly, healthy. (Back in the times of Famine, Soup Kitchens were what were able to keep a lot of our ancestors alive so it's quite the nourishing little dish! ) 


I'm going to go ahead and be completely immodest here and claim that I am a really really good soup maker. It's just a talent of mine to make really yummy soups! (I take after my mom!) And well while I always used to make a great Leek & Potato or a good ol' vegetable soup, it was this Christmas that an amazing ingredient presented itself, that I don't think I would ever want to live without again. 


Three delicious syllables ; Butter-nut-squash! How I didn't know about it before is beyond me but now that it's in my life I have been eating it non stop. My little sister Eve was watching a cooking show here by a famous chef Nigella Lawson and well she showed how to prepare a butternut squash and sweet potato soup. And thank God she did! We tasted it for the first time on Christmas Eve and I think we've made a batch of it every week since! It was phenomenal! Just so creamy and sweet and unlike any other soup I had tasted. I decided to look into this scrumptious autumn fruit (though you'd think it was a vegetable!) and find out what it's benefits are.


Apparently there are many;

• Rich in Phytonutrients and Antioxidants (anti-aging yay!)
• High in dietary Fibre
• Significant amounts of potassium which is great for bones
• Significant amounts of vitamin b6 which is needed for proper functioning of nervous and immune system
• the squash's orange color hints at its abundance of heart healthy carotenoids 
• the high levels of beta carotene which are converted to vitamin A in the body help protect against breast cancer and age related macular degeneration as well as aiding in healthy lung development in fetuses and newborns.
• high Vitamin C content

And there are more, this is only some of the benefits, not to mention just how amazing it tastes so it makes being healthy super easy i think! You can even bake the butternut squash and then when roasted scoop out the insides, mash them up with some seasoning and herbs and put them back in their skins and serve as your side dish with you dinner! delish! But for now here's the delicious soup recipe that made me fall in love. If anyone tries it, let me know how you like it too ;)

Roast squash and sweet potato soup with buttermilk blue cheese sauce

Ingredients

• 1 onion, roughly chopped
• 1 butternut squash, unpeeled, halved, seeds scraped out, sliced into 2.5cm/1in x 2.5cm/1in cubes
• 500g/1lb 2oz sweet potatoes, unpeeled, cut into 2.5cm/1in thick rings
• 60ml/2fl oz olive oil
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground nutmeg
• 1.5 litres/2 pints 13fl oz vegetable stock
• 125ml/4oz marsala wine
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the buttermilk cheese sauce

• 125g/4oz blue cheese, crumbled
• 250ml/9fl oz buttermilk
  
  

  Preparation method

  1. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6.
  2. Place the onion, chopped butternut squash and sweet potato onto a baking sheet. Drizzle with oil and sprinkle with the cinnamon and nutmeg. Roast in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour, or until tender.
  3. Allow the vegetables to cool slightly, then place half into a food processor and add 500ml/17fl oz of the vegetable stock. Blend to a purée and transfer to a large pan. Repeat with the remaining roasted vegetables and 500ml/17fl oz more of the stock - transfer the purée to the pan.
  4. Add the remaining 500ml/17fl oz of vegetable stock to the food processor and stir to catch any remnants of the vegetable purée, then pour into the pan.
  5. Add the marsala wine and season, to taste, with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Add a little more water if the soup is too thick for your liking.
  6. For the buttermilk cheese sauce, place the blue cheese and buttermilk into a clean food processor and blend to a paste. Transfer the blue cheese sauce to a jug or bowl.
  7. To serve, ladle the soup into bowls and drizzle some of the blue cheese into each bowl. Leave the sauce on the table for your guests to add more if they wish
     
     
     DEFINITELY ELAA APPROVED!!! :)

Butter; Creamy Blocks Of Nutritional Gold.

Yes it’s true, your eyes are not deceiving you. Butter is actually good for your health. Not just good actually, great! Spreading some rich creamy butter on your morning slice of whole-wheat toast, or sautéing your evening vegetables in this golden goodness is actually a healthful practice and a step that will help bring your body back to balance.



But butter is a saturated fat and saturated fats raise bad cholesterol, which leads to heart disease, right?


Wrong. We can blame this malarkey on a researcher named Ancel keys who was the first to propose that saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet played the major role in heart disease. But in fact numerous studies performed since his claim, have been unable to back up this theory. Turns out that during the first half of the last century as butter and other quality animal fat consumption decreased, the percentage of heart disease increased! So the saturated fat theory doesn’t really hold up in relation to heart disease now does it?


Weston A. Price, a dentist who travelled the world, studying the diets of primitive peoples, spent time researching their diets in lieu of finding the reasons for their robust health, excellent bone structure, and complete rarity of tooth decay and degenerative diseases. His findings throughout all the different cultures were very similar, and one similarity was the inclusion of quality animal fat in the diet including butter.


In an extract from his book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”, marking his studies, he says of butter;


“Isolated Swiss villagers placed a bowl of butter on their church altars, set a wick in it, and let it burn throughout the year as a sign of divinity in the butter. Arab groups also put a high value on butter, especially deep yellow-orange butter from livestock feeding on green grass in the spring and fall. American folk wisdom recognized that children raised on butter were robust and sturdy; but that children given skim milk during their growing years were pale and thin, with "pinched" faces.”


All these fakers, like margarine, which is nothing more than a tub of plastic, and other butter wannabe spreadables that claim to be good for your health and better than the real thing, are really one of the main culprits here in our societies degenerating health! They are chemically created from refined polyunsaturated oils, which turn rancid when heated, and become toxic to your body and considerably lessen your chances of living a healthy, robust life.


But butter, in its natural state, is the innocent victim in all this and its inclusion in our diets plays a key role in bringing our rapidly deteriorating health back from the brink of despair. When we buy butter from a quality source, (Organic or preferably raw, as pasteurization destroys a lot of nutrients) Its health benefits are numerous and although I’m sure it doesn’t take much convincing to have you choose butter over all its other inferior and toxic imposters, just remember these health benefits your also reaping, as you guiltlessly sink your teeth into that warm slice of homemade bread topped with melted butter;


• Vitamin A and Vitamin E both found in Butter, play a strong anti-oxidant role which prevents free-radical damage in the body that weakens arteries.


• Butter is a rich source of selenium , another important anti-oxidant.


• Vitamin A deficiency causes abnormalities of the heart in babies and butter is America’s best and easily absorbed source of Vitamin A.


• Vitamin A, E , Selenium and Cholesterol (yes cholesterol) are anti-oxidants and help prevent against cancer as well as heart disease.


• Something called “The Wulzen Factor” unique only to butter, and discovered by the Dutch researcher Wulzen, is proven to prevent degenerative arthritis--as well as hardening of the arteries, cataracts and calcification of the pineal gland. (unfortunately this factor is destroyed by pasteurization and so is only available in raw butter.)


• Butter is essential for proper functioning of the thyroid gland, due to being a highly absorbable source of iodine and Vitamin A.


• Butter has strong anti-fungal properties and has an important role to play in treating candida overgrowth.


• Butter contributes to weight loss efforts. No, it does not make you fat! (Fat does not make you fat, something I first discovered to my amazement only a few short years ago), as the short and medium chain fatty acids are not stored as adipose tissue but rather are used for quick energy. (The same cannot be said for polyunsaturated oils and olive oil which are in fact stored as fat tissue.) Butter is so rich in nutrients that it leaves a feeling of satisfaction and curbs cravings and bingeing!






And that’s only some Butterly Benefits :) !


So butter is an essential part of any healthful living diet. Butter is no longer to be feared, but embraced for the wonderful nutritious food that it is.

***And if i may, i might take this moment to say that Kerrygold Butter, available in most supermarkets around the states, is one of the best sources of Butter, as even though it is pasteurized, the cows are grass fed and roam happily and freely like cows should!!
How do i know this?? I grew up looking at those cows everyday of my young life in the green fields of my home county!! Yes KerryGold butter comes from Co.kerry Ireland! And it's absolutely positively delish!! ***


Here at ELAA, Butter is Body Beautiful Approved!!