Thanksgiving Vegetable Soups

You can adjust the amount of each vegetable to suit your taste, but keep the total quantity the same.

Lee Hefter loves the spices used for pumpkin pie, so he makes this silky, fragrant soup with them.

Thanksgiving Make-Ahead Tip: The soup can be made ahead and refrigerated for up to 2 days.

Dean Fearing loves the holiday feel of butternut squash, especially when it’s combined with ginger, as it is for his smooth, gently sweet soup. He tops it with whipped cream flecked with chopped pecans for a number of reasons: “Usually holiday soups have a dollop of cream—adding pecans gives it a dollop of flavor. And crunch. I think everything should have a little bit of crunch to it. Plus, this is Texas, and pecans are Texas.”

If you have a blender and good chicken broth, Kristin Kimball swears it’s one of the easiest soups to make. This version has a fabulous topping of supercrispy sourdough and pancetta crumbs mixed with sage and rosemary.

Mary Ellen Diaz loves how cauliflower adds a natural, clean flavor to this luscious soup as well as lots of vitamins: Three florets provide close to half the daily requirement of vitamin C.

Trina Hahnemann calls the root vegetables in this simple vegetarian soup the “gold of Nordic soil” because they’re high in nutrients and grow well in cold climates.

Sweet potatoes are a great source of beta-carotene, essential for vision. The soup uses only one cup of the ginger broth; the rest makes a terrific cooking liquid for grains like quinoa.