Soup warms you up, builds bonds

@SP Body Copy:The saying “easy as pie” should really be “easy as soup.”

Pie dough, especially, can be tricky, but all you need for soup is a liquid — water, broth or milk — and any other ingredients you can find in your kitchen. Except maybe candy and cookies.

I like making soup because it doesn’t take a lot of time to make, it’s simple and it warms you up. Especially this time of year, when it the snow comes up to your knees and the wind chills you down to your bones, a hot bowl of soup hits the spot.

My favorite soup is butternut squash soup.

This summer we grew our own butternut squash. A ripe squash is beige colored with no green and when you cut it open it’s the same color as a pumpkin. It’s pretty hard to cut open, so ask your Mom or Dad to do that. Or, look for squash that’s already cubed in the produce section at the grocery store.

I like to roast the squash before adding to the soup; roasting brings out its sweetness (my mom calls it caramelization).

There are many varieties of this soup, but I like it really thick and creamy. You can make the soup creamy with cream, but that adds a lot of fat and calories and you’d have to walk up a sledding hill a hundred times to burn off just one bowl of this kind of soup.

Another way to get that creamy texture is to purée the soup. You can do that in a blender or with one of those stick blenders (Mom calls it an immersion blender) that goes right into the soup pot.

A word from Mom

Making soup is a great way to introduce children to cooking because, unlike baking which requires strict measurements, the recipes are so adaptable.

Vegetable soup, for example, can be made with any vegetables your kids like, from carrots and corn to spinach and zucchini. The dicing/chopping doesn’t have to be precise and the amounts don’t have to be exact. Want a brothier soup? Add more stock. A thick, chunky soup? Add more veggies and maybe some pasta.

Don’t be intimated by butternut squash for this recipe. Pick out a squash that’s more squat than it is lean and curvy for easier handling.

Instead of trying to cut through the tough rind down the whole length of the fruit (yes, it’s a fruit), cut it in half crosswise first. Now you have a flat surface to put on the cutting board while you halve it lengthwise.

ŸJerome Gabriel is in fifth grade and has been helping in the kitchen since he could hold a spoon. His mother, Deborah Pankey, is the food editor at the Daily Herald.