9/23 winter squash soup with cannellini beans, turnips, and fried sage bread crumbs

My CSA supplies me with many a squash throughout the fall and winter months. I'm pretty comfortable with butternut squash and spaghetti squash, but I've been getting delicata squash for the last couple of weeks, which is a little more mysterious. It looks a lot like an acorn squash, and I've never been particularly found of acorn squash.

I decided to try out another Vegetable Soups recipe that calls for butternut squash. I figured it would be close enough - right? Without having had the opportunity to make a direct comparison with butternut, I think the delicata might be even better here. It held up well over the course of cooking and brought a sweet, subtle flavor. The other veggies are little white tokyo turnips (also quite sweet when cooked), cabbage, and onion. To this, I added canellini beans and their cooking broth plus some store-bought veggie stock.

Debora Madison warns that this is a very sweet soup and needs something savory to balance the flavors (here, bread crumbs fried with sage and garlic). It looked lovely and tasted great on a cloudy Sunday afternoon, with the smell of our first rain in something like 6 months drifting in through the window.