In this sponsored YouTube cooking demonstration, Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, walks viewers through a quick fall soup recipe that leverages a Vitamix Professional 750 blender. She begins by introducing the Vitamix partnership, sharing her 15‑year experience with the machine and positioning it as a worthwhile kitchen investment. Cheryl then prepares the ingredients: roughly chopping red onion, red peppers, garlic, and diced butternut squash (or using pre‑cut squash), and highlights the importance of high‑quality olive oil, warning against adulterated seed‑oil blends. The vegetables are tossed with olive oil and roasted on a single sheet pan at 400 °F for about 20 minutes until fork‑tender. After roasting, everything is transferred to the Vitamix, where she adds spices (salt, pepper, red‑pepper flakes, cumin), fresh thyme (with guidance on fresh vs. dried herb ratios), vegetable broth, and a final drizzle of olive oil. Using the blender’s dedicated soup setting, the friction of the blades heats the mixture, producing a smooth, hot soup without additional reheating. She tastes the soup, adjusts seasoning, and suggests serving it with grilled chicken and a thyme garnish. Throughout, Cheryl offers practical kitchen tips, health notes (e.g., garlic’s immune benefits, the inflammatory nature of low‑quality seed oils), and personal anecdotes, concluding with an invitation for viewers to try the recipe and provide feedback.
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Hey everyone, I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, coming to you today from my kitchen. As you can see, I'm really excited to share a new fall recipe with you, and it is roasted butternut squash and roasted red pepper soup. And it is all going to be super simple, basically made on one sheet pan and then popped into the Vitamix, and we'll have a delicious soup for dinner that is ready very, very quickly. So before we get started, I just mentioned Vitamix, and this video is actually sponsored by them. I have had my Vitamix for 15, 16 years now. It is one of my most favorite pieces of kitchen equipment. It was such a great investment. I have the Professional 750 model, but they have so many great ones, and it's really fantastic for soups. It is great for smoothies, my protein shakes. Um, it has just been a wonderful addition to my kitchen, so I was really excited when I had the chance to partner with them. So this is the first time that I'm ever sharing this recipe. It is developed and designed especially to work with the Vitamix. So let's get started. First thing I'm going to do is do a rough chop on some of the vegetables, toss it with a little bit of olive oil, and then we're going to roast those in the oven for a few minutes before we actually blend it all together. So first we'll take the, um, red onion, and we're going to use about half a medium one. So we'll cut this in half and I'll save half for later for a different recipe. Also looks like I need to sharpen my knives a little bit. So we get this, um, like I said, this red onion in a rough chop and just taking the hard end off there. Now, if you love onion, you could do a little bit more. Of course, this whole recipe is awesome to do to taste with the seasonings and some of the things you're going to be using. But first, we'll put in the red onion. And then I'm going to just have the red peppers and take out the seeds and the stem and then pop those in the bowl. So all of these are just going to, like I said, be tossed in a little bit of olive oil before we roast them in the oven. So one thing to notice about olive oil too, a few years ago, and this is kind of important, a few years ago There was a whole, I guess, controversy around olive oils because they tested a bunch of them and it turns out they were substituting in low-quality oils just to make the product cheaper. So things like soybean oil or corn oil were being put into olive oil and it's not pure olive oil. And there's a huge difference there because we're starting to discover that seed oils are highly inflammatory, gives you way too much omega-6. 6. Most people already have way too much of that. You don't need to be adding it with poor quality seed oils. So I highly recommend looking into your olive oil, making sure that you check. There's an organization, the name is escaping me at the moment, but I'll put the link down below. But it's basically an organization that tests olive oils, and certain olive oils are certified to be totally pure. So it's always a good thing to check on. Now, as far as the butternut squash, if you can't find already pre-chopped, and this is nice because butternut squash can be very difficult to chop. If you've ever tried that, to peel and chop it, it requires a very sharp knife and, um, some patience because it's a very hard squash to deal with. So I found this pre-cut squash in the grocery store. It's pretty common to find this now, especially going into fall. So look for that if you don't want to do it. If you have a whole butternut squash though, it's really easy since we're blending this up into a soup anyway. It doesn't need to be diced like this one is.. So you can simply cut it in half, rub it with a little olive oil, and roast that in the oven as a whole butternut squash. But it's going to take a lot longer, so you'll do that separately from the rest of the vegetables if you choose to use a whole butternut squash. But what I'm using here is 2 cups of diced, and then you could just kind of estimate that obviously if you end up using the whole butternut squash. But we'll put those in there. Also have some garlic cloves and put those in the oven to roast as well. So I'm just quickly taking the skin off of these, and one was kind of small, so the recipe calls for 2, but I'm gonna go with 3 since I said one of these was a bit smaller than the other, and I love garlic. So obviously, again, you can always adjust this to your personal taste level. If you love garlic, it's a great, great flavor and also really good for your immune system. So in the fall, that's kind of a nice thing to add into your diet. So, okay, I've got the red peppers, the butternut squash, the garlic, and the onion in the bowl, and I'm just going to guesstimate about a tablespoon of olive oil here, just pouring that over and stir this together just to coat the veggies with the olive oil. And I'm not putting any of the spices yet. We're going to do that all when we blend it up in the Vitamix. So you're just looking to coat the vegetables, and then I'm going to pour these just onto a sheet pan, so cooking sheet, which is funny because for years I would just call this a cookie sheet, which is totally fine, of course, because a lot of us use this kind of pan to make cookies, but it is just, you know, for any kind of cooking. So this one, since the vegetables already obviously coated in olive oil, I didn't do anything to the pan. And you can see here we're ready to roast, so we're going to take this over to the oven. Preheated to 400 degrees. I've got a center rack ready to go, and these will go into the oven for just about 20 minutes or until the vegetables are fork tender. Okay, the veggies are now done. So you can see these were just roasted in the oven, looking all delicious. If there's any brown on your peppers, we're not worrying about peeling them or doing anything because the Vitamix is so powerful, it just blends everything super smooth. So same thing with the butternut squash, it's a very hard and fibrous vegetable, and so using a powerful blender is really nice to get this as smooth as possible, so it just makes the nicest consistency. So these, um, have, like I said, gotten to a fork tender place. So if you are roasting the butternut squash instead of cubing it, you're just going to measure out a cup and a half of that cooked butternut squash to put in this recipe. But if you did the cubes, you're just good to go. We're going to put it all into the Vitamix now. So you can see I've got the nice wide mouth on the container that comes with this Professional 750 model, and we're just going to put all the vegetables right into the blender. So I remember when I had blenders prior to this one, I wanted a Vitamix for so, so long, and I just didn't make the investment. I wondered if it was really worth it. Is it that much better? The answer is yes. And like I said, I've had mine for over 15 years now, so it is an investment at the beginning, but it's something that you will have in your kitchen for the rest of your life, probably. Um, never had any issues with this blender, whereas when I had some blenders before, quite often they would only last a short amount of time and then quit working, and I never had a blender that blended anything as smooth as the Vitamix does. The other great thing that I love about the Vitamix is that the friction of the blades is so strong that you can actually cook a soup from scratch in here. I like having the flavor of the roasting with the vegetables, um, so we're really just going to use it to blend. But the nice thing is, after it blends in the Vitamix, it is hot enough to go ahead and serve because the friction of the blades, it's so powerful, and the motor are creating this, um, a lot of heat in the, in the container. And in addition to that, the professional one actually has a particular setting for soup, so it spins the blades very, very quickly to get that friction heat going. And so once this is all blended up, it's going to be ready to serve. Let's go ahead and then put the rest of the ingredients into the Vitamix. So I'm just adjusting this so you can see the blender a little better. And if you look at the front of this, you can see it's got all kinds of settings. Actually, I'll just take this off here for a second, but it's got the soup setting, the cold setting for like doing ice cream or cold drinks or cold beverages. It's got the cleaning function. So all of that is set up really nicely. But for now, we're going to go ahead and put in the rest of the ingredients. So as you can see here, I have already measured out all of my spices— salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, cumin. I'm probably forgetting something, but it's all in the recipe, of course. So just go ahead and put that right into the blender. And the last thing I called for in the recipe meat is dried thyme, but I have fresh thyme right now, and because I like to use this for garnish when I'm presenting the soup, so I'm just going to go ahead and use some fresh thyme. Whenever you use fresh herbs, you need to use more of it than dried because obviously dried is much more concentrated. So usually you can plan on about doubling the amount of fresh herbs versus whatever a recipe calls for dried. And personally, I love the taste of thyme, so not being all that careful about how much I'm putting in here. And you can see I'm just kind of pulling the leaves off of the stems to get that ready to go. Again, the Vitamix is so powerful though, if you have small stems. It's just going to blend it right up, so don't worry about that too much or spend too much time on it. And then finally, we're going to add in the vegetable broth and the final tablespoon of the olive oil. So the recipe calls for 2 tablespoons. We use a tablespoon of it to roast the veggies, and then we're using a tablespoon of it just in the soup itself. So I'll add that in as the last step here, and then we'll go ahead and blend. You'll notice, yeah, once you've been cooking for years, you kind of have a good sense of how much a tablespoon or a cup or whatever measurement it is. So now we're going to actually turn on the blender. So you can see here, the Vitamix is now on. I have got it on the soup setting. So we're just going to turn it on and let it work its magic. Okay, I let that run for about 5 minutes so that the soup is super smooth and super hot. So now let's go ahead and give this a taste. And as I take off the lid, you can see it is steaming hot. So it not only blends it so, so smoothly, but it also puts all this heat into the soup so you don't have to reheat this again. Once it's blended, you're just ready to serve. So let's go ahead and pour some of this out. Oh my gosh, it is so smooth. You can see this color, such a beautiful fall color, nice and orange for the season. And now let's give it a taste. Mm. So it's always critical to go ahead and taste the soup after you've blended it. And what I'm noticing here is that it could use a little bit more salt. So normally I would— I poured this out to show you. Normally I would not do that. Normally I would just take a little spoon out of the blender, taste it for seasoning, make sure that that's all good to go, and then go ahead and pour it for serving. But this is pretty close. I'm going to add a little bit more salt and then we're going to enjoy this tonight for dinner. With some grilled chicken. So I hope you enjoyed this recipe and enjoyed learning a little bit more about the Vitamix and why it's such a great investment. Again, thanks to Vitamix for sponsoring this video. I always make all of these lovely soups in the fall. I use it so much, and so it is nice to have been able to partner with them. So anyway, have a great rest of your day. Let me know if you try the recipe. I'd love to hear your feedback, and I will see you again soon.
