The perfect lower-cal comfort food

We don’t know about you, but as soon as fall hits and the clocks roll back for day-light savings, all we want to do is cozy up with some of our fall favorites. Recently, we made a big batch of this Butternut Squash Soup and shared it with some friends that were visiting for the weekend. It proved to be the perfect fall comfort food that even the kids loved.

This simple slow cooker meal is vegan, gluten-free and filled with healthy ingredients. Why do we love it? It’s low-maintenance and so incredibly cozy and delicious! We hope your family loves it as much as ours does.

Prep ahead

We’re always looking for ways to reduce time in the kitchen and simplify healthy eating, especially throughout the week. While this meal is super simple to toss together, it can be prepped the night before to save on time. Add all the slow cooker ingredients to your slow cooker dish, cover and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, cook as directed.

What to serve this soup with:

We love to serve this dish with Cornbread Muffins.

Some simple soup tips:

• To minimize cleanup, use an immersion blender directly in your slow cooker, if possible. If you’re using a traditional high-powered blender, you’ll have to blend the soup in batches. Allow soup to cool a bit, only fill the blender up halfway, remove the center piece of the blender lid and hold a towel over the lid when blending. The built-up steam from hot soup can actually blow off the lid of the blender… trust us, we learned this the hard way!!
• You’ll notice the recipe calls for light, unsweetened coconut milk. You can use regular or light coconut milk in this recipe. We prefer light to cut back on fat content (since we love to eat nut-butter and avocados each day).
• You can garnish your soup with none, any or all of the suggested toppings. Use your toppings as an additional way to flavor your soup to your families preferences and palates.