How To Cut Butternut Squash & Make 4min Soup in the Vitamix BlenditandMendit

Hi, I'm Jane from http://www.BlenditandMendit.com where I show you how I turn my VitaMix blender into my #1 anti-aging tool. Welcome. Autumn is here, the weather is cooling off and I keep seeing the beautiful butternut squash in the store. I want to make a soup with it. How do you cut them open? How do you peel them? And how do you make a delicious, fast, easy, simple, nutritious soup out of them? I'm gonna show you how right now. The first thing you want to do when cutting anything is make sure it is stable on the surface. You don't want it tipping over while you're cutting. To accomplish that, we're going to lay the squash on its side and cut off the ends so that they're flat. Now take a vegetable peeler and you can peel it down the sides. Now the butternut squash is completely peeled and ready to go. What I want you to do is stand it upright so that it is stable, take your big knife... keep your fingers out of the way, fold them under... and then work the knife right through it like this. And you get your two halves. Now scrape the seeds out. I like to use a metal spatula, this one has a serrated edge, of course you can use a regular metal spoon. Go ahead and scrape the seeds out and clean up the well. Save the seeds, they're like pumpkin seeds, you can roast or dehydrate them. Spice them up any way you want, they're a wonderful snack. Now the butternut squash is peeled, cleaned out and ready to chop. Lay the two sides on your cutting board, flat, remember to always keep these types of heavy, hard to cut type of vegetables stable on the cutting surface so you don't hurt yourself or somebody else. Slice each one in half, then... [chopping] Now the beautiful butternut squash is rendered into squares that are easy to work with. I'm going to drop about 2 cups in to the VitaMix. The rest you can cover, put in the fridge and they'll last for a few days and there's many things you can make with them. This is the base for our soup. Now lets make the soup. Here's a good way to measure your liquids for this dependng on how thick you want it. I have about 2 cups of the butternut squash in here. It doesn't look like it, but there's a lot of natural water in this vegetable. So I'm only going to add half as much almond milk. To the base of almond milk and the fresh butternut squash chunks, I am adding one clove of garlic, a little chunk of onion, a tsp of cumin, that's going to give us that wonderful, warming mediterranean flavor. Love the cumin. A teaspoon of pink Himalayan sea salt and let's go with 6 whole peppercorns. You can add more or less. We're going to blend it, taste it and if it needs doctoring then we'll doctor it; if not then I'm hoping it'll be perfect just the way it is. If you want this to be a raw soup, where you get all your enzymes alive, you can stop right here. I want to make this a steaming hot soup, so I'm going to keep blending 4 or 5 minutes until I see steam coming out of the blender. Do you see the steam coming out of the ViatMix? This is one of my favorite things to do - make a whole food, fresh hot soup in 4 minutes. Look at that. This is delicious. That cumin is wonderful. You have to make this. You can make this with potatoes or any kind of squash or with pumpkin. It's a vey elegant soup. You can easily serve this to people and they will be very impressed. Very satisfying, especially with the pumpkin seeds. Look at the color. Those are the bright colors that hold all of the phytonutrients and the anti-oxidants and all that good stuff we're looking for. This is delicious. I want you to make this, then please come back and comment below and tell me if you made it just like I did, using my recipe, what you thought of it, or if you mofdified it, I would love to know. I think I'm going to call this 'golden autumn butternut squash soup.'