Butternut Squash & Sausage Soup

Hats off to Brianne for inspiring this most awesome of dishes!  She mentioned her soup on Facebook and I became immediately obsessed with making my own.  She used a recipe from Emeril, which I immediately googled (for inspirational purposes only, of course).  Emeril is one of my favorite chefs and I've always found his recipes to be reliable.  Don't you hate it when recipes just don't work?  Me, too.  I've never had that problem with Emeril's stuff, though.  But I digress.  Enough about Emeril.  Back to the amazing soup I made.

After checking out a couple of recipes, I set out to decide what my version was going to look like.  I even dreamed about it the other night.  Yeah, I know.  That's weird.  At least I'll be able to sleep now since I finally made the soup.  Needless to say, it was a huge success.  It's also very low in calories.

Here's what you'll need:

1 butternut squash
4 cups of chicken broth
2 uncooked bratwurst or other bun-sized sausages
1 cup of 2% milk
2/3 cup of wild rice
Seasonings to taste (salt, pepper & Jane's Crazy Mixed Up Salt)

Peel the squash and remove the seeds.  I recommend a potato peeler.  The squash is hard like a sweet potato and peeling it with a knife turned out to be a bad idea.  Cut your peeled squash into small pieces and place them in a large stock pot.  Add the chicken broth and bring to a boil. 

While the squash is boiling, cut the casing of your sausage and squeeze the meat out into a skillet.  Brown it just like you would hamburger meat.  When the meat is finished, drain it well on paper towels.

When the squash pieces are soft, use a potato masher to squish them up really well.  The squash gets very soft very fast so mashing it is quite easy.  Add the milk and stir to combine.  Reduce the heat to simmering and add the rice and the sausage.  Cover the pot and let it cook until the rice is ready.  When the rice is completely cooked, add your seasonings to taste.

You may have noticed that I provided (gasp) actual measurements this time.  I'm afraid that's an unfortunate by-product of Michael's new diet.  I can't keep up with the calorie count if I don't know how much of each ingredient I'm using.  I'm like a child forced to color inside the lines when I desperately want to scribble all over the paper.  Sigh.

The good news is that this recipe makes four decent sized portions, each of which weighs in at around 210 calories.  Michael decided that he could eat a whole pot twice a day and still have 300 calories left to play with.   Not.