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So, my butternut squash apple cider soup…

…was not quite the hearty, creamy, flavorful, tasty meal I was envisioning. In fact, it was kind of gross. Pretty, and just the right consistency, but gross.

And I’m really sad about this.

Not only did I spend a couple bucks and nearly three hours preparing it, but now I have a giant vat of not-so-tasty soup taking up room in our fridge that I have no idea what to do with. The soup was inspired by an absolutely phenomenal butternut squash apple cider soup infused with roasted red peppers that we had in Door County last month. It was so delicious that I was just dying to recreate it!

I like butternut squash. I like apples. I like apple cider. I like onions. So what’s the problem here? Sunday night I plucked two different recipes for this soup off of Food Network and Epicurious.com and, like I usually do because I like to tweak recipes and put my own twist on things, I combined them to form one recipe of epic awesomeness. I don’t change big things, just little ones here and there. This has never failed me in the past, but this time I’m not quite sure what the culprit was.

I have a sneak suspicion it was the yellow onions that both recipes called for. I think they added an awkward sweetness and odd flavor mix to the apples and butternut squash that could have been avoided by using a spicer onion, like a white onion. But if that’s the case, then why did both soup recipes receive rave reviews and nobody else seems to think the yellow onions were a problem? I took a bowlful of the soup out of the pot and tried adding a bit of roasted red pepper paste to spice it up, which helped tone down the sweetness a touch, but did nothing for the flavor. So I scooped out a bit more of the soup and added some cream to it. It helped neutralize the flavor a good deal so it was manageable to choke down a spoonful, which was better than nothing, but by adding cream the soup went from super healthy to less healthy and more creamy. And it still wasn’t good enough to eat an entire bowl of.

Sigh.

So, do you think I can salvage this? I talked to a few soup connoisseurs at work today and one suggested adding a squeeze of apple cider vinegar while the other suggested adding more curry powder. They’re both good ideas and worth a try, but it’s not just the sweetness I’m concerned with. It’s the actual flavor.

Anyone have any advice on how to fix this? Do you think it can still be salvaged as a soup, and if not, can it be salvaged as anything else? Perhaps a base for something?