Cold Weather Cabbage Soup with Butternut Squash and Turmeric
Looking outside and watching snow fall down, or coming inside after shoveling, or even just spending all day inside a house your too environmentally conscious (cheap) to heat beyond a barely livable point all leaves you wanting something warm and homey for dinner. When the snow starts falling, I always find myself making some variation of a cold weather cabbage soup- brothy, aromatic turmeric and weaving notes of thyme, the understated comforts of cabbage. This time I’ve added a sweet and tender butternut squash to the mix, which brightens up the whole soup. A warming, light, yet substantial meal, this soup is sure to be a hit and become a staple in your weekly repertoire this winter.
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Most soups can be sorted into one of two camps- thick or brothy. While I do like a thick soup (such as my Watercress Chestnut Soup or this Roasted Carrot, Garlic and Rosemary Soup) I am more partial to a brothy soup. These are the soups that carry most of their flavor in a watery, delicate broth and are punctuated with large pieces of vegetable, grain or seed. Soups such as Christmas Lima Bean Soup or Lentil, Chestnut Mushrooms and Amaranth Winter Soup. When I take my bowl of brothy soup, it’s typically a whole lot of broth, with a few bits of veg (while the person I’m eating with seems to have the opposite). To make your meal a little more substantial, try adding crackers or fresh bread, and using them to soak up that delicious broth flavor.
For this cold weather cabbage soup you will need 10 cups of liquid. I used vegetable broth, as I make my own from vegetable scraps and always have some on hand. If you want to, you can also just use water (although it will be a little less flavorful), or a combination of broth and water.
One of the things you might notice about this recipe is I use two onions, cut different ways and cooked different times. I do that because I’m a little bit of an onion fanatic, and just having an onion-flavored broth, or a soup with onions in it isn’t enough. I need both. If you’re not so much an onion fan, leave out the second onion (the one cut like half-moons), but the first onions is really essential to life up the flavor of the cold weather cabbage soup broth. Aside from that, this is a pretty simple soup recipe. After the onion, garlic and spices are cooked in some oil, add the cabbage, making sure to toss it well so that each little strip is coated in the garlicky, onion, turmeric and nooch seasoned oil. After that you add the broth, and the rest of the vegetables. The squash and the potatoes will be your measure of when the soup is done- a cooked potato will be easy to stab with a fork, and your squash should be almost falling apart.
Cold Weather Cabbage Soup with Butternut Squash and Turmeric
Ingredients
- Ingredients
- 2 onions
- 4-6 cloves of garlic
- ½ a large cabbage (about 3-4 cups chopped cabbage)
- 1 butternut squash
- 4-5 medium potatoes
- Olive oil
- 2 tsp. turmeric
- 3 tsp. nutritional yeast
- 1 tsp. dried thyme
- 1 tsp. salt, plus more to taste
- Pepper, to taste
- 10 cups of vegetable broth or water (or a combination)
Instructions
- Start by prepping your vegetables. Chop one onion into half-moon strips, and dice the other. Mince the garlic. Half, core and chop the cabbage into strips. Peel the squash and remove the seeds, before cutting into cubes. Peel the potatoes if you wish, or just chop into cubes (store the potatoes in water until use to avoid oxidation).
- Put a large pot on the stove, and heat a generous amount of olive oil. Add the diced onions (not the half-moons) and garlic, and sauté for a few minutes until fragrant. Add the turmeric, nutritional yeast, thyme, and 1 tsp. salt, and toast for about one minute, stirring to not allow the spices to burn. Next add your cabbage, stirring until all of it has been coated with the spices and oil.
- Pour in the vegetable broth or water, cover the pot and bring to a boil before reducing to a simmer. After about 5 or so minutes simmering, add the potatoes and squash. Let cook for another 5 minutes before adding the half-mooned onions. Continue to simmer until the squash and potatoes can be easily pierced with a fork. Remove from the heat, season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve.
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Let’s hear from you…
- Are you a brothy soup or thick soup person?
- What other foods/beverages do you use to warm you up as the winter approaches?
- Do you eat more of the larger chunks, and less broth? Want to be soup sharing buddies?
Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
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I’ve made this soup twice now and I love it! The recipe is simple and well written, and it’s just what I was looking for to use up my abundance of local seasonal produce. It a comforting soup for the cooler weather, and I’ll be bookmarking it for sure! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Hi Krystol,
Thanks so much for the comment, we’re so glad you liked it!
Delicious soup, but if you are going blog about a recipe it would be far more beneficial for you to incorporate nutritional values into the blog. I have a child with juvenile diabetes, which is not a lifestyle desease, it’s an autoimmune desease. Our eating locally produced food could not prevent the diagnosis. By adding nutritional values to your blogs you become more credible, and allow others to find the carb and protein ratios needed to live a healthy life.
Thanks for the comment, and so glad you enjoyed the soup. I don’t share nutritional values on my recipes because I’m not an expert in nutrition, and it’s not something that I personally track. I understand that people like your child have unique dietary needs, and show my respect to that by not including nutritional data for which I’m not am expert. There are plenty of blogs that specialize in that, but at Very Vegan Val we know our talents lie in creating delicious and creative recipes.
I have made this multiple times and it is wonderful when following the recipe as written, and it is great when I added carrots and butter beans too. The blend of flavors from the squash, cabbage, nutritional yeast, and onions is so comforting for these cold winter nights. I have this recipe bookmarked and it is one I come back to often. Making it again tonight. Thank you!
We’re so glad you like this soup, Kathy! I’ll definitely be throwing some butter beans into my next batch, they sound like a fantastic addition.
Made this soup tonight. Absolutely delicious! So welcoming on this cold, cold night 🙂 just one question, does this freeze well?
So glad you liked it Tina! I’ve only tried freezing it once, but it was still really good when we thawed it.
Tried this for the first time today. I made a few alterations: I added 2 tsp. curry powder; I mashed the potatoes & squash once they were well-cooked to make a thicker broth (not puréed); I added a bit of honey; and I added some mango-ginger chutney I had on hand.
We really liked it!
Glad you enjoyed it, and love how you made it your own! I sometimes will puree about 1/3 of a soup to get it thicker without losing the bits 😋