Some quantity of squash. My favorite is butternut squash, but I used pumpkin, because we had some still lying around frozen from Thanksgiving. Any winter squash will work. (Actually *anything* will work, you can leave out the squash and just use "other vegetables" below.) A similar but somewhat smaller quantity of other vegetables; I used limp carrots and celery from the bottom of the refrigerator. Some number of onions. The volume of onions should be 1/2 to 2/3 the "similar quantity" above. Some number of potatoes; I generally use the same number as I used onions. (Secret ingredient alert! This is what thickens it and gives it a smooth texture.) Leave on the peels for added vitamins. You can also use leftover mashed potatoes. A few cloves of garlic; some chopped fresh ginger (I did not use enough in the batch I just made, and had to augment it with powdered.) If the squash is not already baked, cut it in half, scoop out all the seeds, lightly oil the cut edges, place face down in a (preferably glass) baking dish, and bake at 350 degrees (Fahrenheit) for about an hour, or until it's pretty darn soft when you stick a fork in it. It should almost be falling apart. It might take an hour and a half. Let cool enough so that you don't burn your fingers, and cut or scrape the peel off. You can freeze the extra if you don't want to make as much soup as, say, a whole pumpkin would make all at once. Boil some water in a pot, enough to cover the rest of the vegetables, but not to make too huge an amount of extra broth. I usually put in just a little salt, perhaps half a teaspoon, into the broth. Chop up the vegetables, you don't have to be very careful, but if you just throw them in whole, they will take forever to get soft. You have to wait until the vegetables are very soft, probably 45 minutes to an hour. Carrots and potatoes take the longest, followed by celery and onions. Summer squash is pretty fast, and the tops of broccoli is pretty fast, but broccoli stems can be pretty slow, and you have to peel them or they really never actually get soft all the way through. Be creative; use up lots of extra vegetables. You should be putting the garlic and ginger in with the rest of the vegetables. Lately I have been sauteing the onions and garlic in a large splash of vegetable oil because it gives a better mouth-feel, but you can make it fat-free and just dump these into the pot with the vegetables. Get out your Cuisinart or your blender; set it between the pot with the vegetables in broth and a clean pot. Puree in batches, adding squash chunks (and saute'd onion, if you did that) to each batch. You will have to experiment to find out how much makes a good batch in your particular Cuisinart, and how much broth you should put in to make it work well. I have found that, while you may puree the different vegetables separately, that it seems to do a better job of mixing if you go ahead and puree all types of things together. It's kind of fun, because one always ends up with a different number of carrots in each batch, so each batch is a slightly different color when you put it in the clean pot, and you can play little finger painty bits with your spoon. Strain the broth with the last bit of the veggies and stuff, so you make sure that you get everything into the puree, especially since the last bits is spice heavy, because ginger and garlic are small. (Secretly you'll need one more pot, to hold the broth.) You will eventually have to mix it all together to make one boring color (usually a lovely orange, though sometimes if you have too much bright green vegetable it is kind of an ugly brownish greenish horrible color). Put the pot with the pureed stuff back on the stove. Add spices, e.g. white pepper, ground thyme, ground cloves, maybe more ginger, maybe some nutmeg. Sometimes I put more fresh green spices into the vegetable broth bits, and sometimes I'll add oregano or some other green spice, and sometimes I'll use some other ground brown spices in the resulting soup. Almost anything will work, food is good. (Soup is good food!) Sometimes I put in too much cloves, which gives it kind of a cloying flavor, so go light there. Stir this all around, and gradually add some of the extra broth to make a good viscosity of soup. I usually end up with a cup or two of extra broth, which I just freeze, and use in recipes that call for chicken stock, especially if I am trying to take a recipe which is otherwise vegetarian, but calls for chicken stock, into something that is actually vegetarian. If, you decide that you need more broth then you have, go ahead and just use water to thin the soup. Let it cook for a while on low (if you turn up too high, then when it boils, you get the the Vesuvius effect and soup splatters all over your stove), stirring occasionally. Now taste it, and decide if you need to add any other spices. Depending on how much quantity of stuff you actually used, half a teaspoon may not be enough. Do remember that the soup will blend as time passes, so if you are planning to eat this tomorrow, you might want to go slightly light on the spicing. On the other hand, you don't want it to be boring! I guess I let it spend about half an hour to 45 minutes in this stage, but less is OK if you're hungry. Eat! This soup freezes well, and nukes up nicely. And it's vegan and can be made practically fat-free, and yummy as all get out. Instant pot: 4 minutes pressure cook + 5 min natural release. Saute onions, ginger, and garlic in pot first with largish splash of oil, then throw in veggies and some water. For a small batch, tried ~2C water, was nearly perfect, could have been more, as I needed to add a little water at the end. For a larger batch, used ~3C water, was perfect. Also, didn't bother to saute, just poured in a little oil. This was OK as long as I used up all the broth at the end; otherwise I would have wasted a bunch of my oil (or, perhaps inadvertently added oil to any leftover broth). Note: for just processing pumpkin and/or butternut squash, this same timing works (or maybe 5+5), with 2C water. (Note from 2022, this didn't work with 1/4 butternut squashes. Maybe need to chop them up smaller first, maybe need to peel them first. Maybe pumpkin are softer to start.)