Pumpkin Pie Meets Carrot Cake

…and with a little help from yours truly, they got married. 😉

So what exactly prompted this serendipitous matrimony?

I mentioned to you all earlier how our backyard garden has been churning out a wide variety of veggies…

Well, lately, the garden has rapidly been taken over by butternut squash babies! Their vines have literally been creeping up everywhere. The squashies themselves are popping up like daisies and growing faster than weeds. In the midst of this silent frenzy, I am still trying to finish the first squash we harvested!

I’ve had the pleasure of squeezing butternut squash into my meals almost every day for the past week or so, from wraps to “salads” and everything in between. However, for some reason I did not think to prepare this delicious vegetable in one of my favorite ways, as butternut squash soup. Two nights ago, I set out to do just that.

I wanted to recreate a butternut squash and apple soup that I had sampled from Wegmans a couple years ago, but I did not have any apples on hand. Luckily, I did have a bunch of figs that needed to be used. At the last minute I also decided that carrots would add another dimension of sweetness to the mix. And thus, with a whirl of the blender, a dessert-like “soup” was born.

Dinner that night involved a bowl of this chunky, decadent “soup,” alongside some sautéed vegetables: onion, broccoli, and mushrooms.

(By the way, this meal alone was a confirmation that onions, broccoli, and b-nut squash are indeed my favorite veggies ever.)

I had some leftover butternut fig soup, so I decided to experiment with it for breakfast the next morning.

I made a batch of overnight oats, and in the AM topped it with butternut fig puree (I drained out some of the soup’s liquid) and other goodies.

The end result:

Oh my.

It tasted like pumpkin pie…

…and also a little like carrot cake.

It was as if the two got married and produced this bundle of joy.

And if you thought my other oatmeal breakfasts looked suspiciously like dessert…

…this one’s the most guilty.

Vegetables for breakfast? I don’t mind.

I’ve added the complete recipes for the soup and oats to my Recipes Index, if you are interested in the details.

Expect a cooked oats version of this making an appearance, come fall and winter. 😀