{REVIEW + GIVEAWAY} Creamy roasted eggplant soup, and a chance to win your own copy of The Ultimate One Pan Oven Cookbook

Naturally smoky, piquant and full of deep flavours, this creamy roasted eggplant soup will put some zest into the cold season. Get this recipe and find many other hassle-free weeknight delights in The Ultimate One-Pan Oven Cookbook - enter my giveaway for a chance to win your own copy! Please note that this post contains affiliate links - thank you for supporting the brands that help make this blog possible.

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As soon as the temperatures drop, I find myself reaching out for my old trusted soup pot (find more soup recipes here). With a thick bottom and the ability to encapsulate aromas until the lid is removed and their potency is released into the air, perfuming your whole house, my soup pot is often the most-used instrument in my kitchen during fall and winter.

So you can imagine my surprise when the recipe for Julia Konovalova's creamy roasted eggplant soup from The Ultimate One-Pan Oven Cookbook involved no use of a soup pot! Instead, this ingenious recipe, like all the recipes in Julia's cookbook, makes use of one main kitchen device: the oven. 

To prep this recipe, all manner of beautiful late-summer vegetables go onto a big cookie sheet: eggplants, tomatoes and bell peppers, joined by plump cloves of garlic. After a slow while in the oven, the entire pan is pulled out, its pungent smell enough to get you intoxicated long before you open the bottle of heady red wine that simply has to accompany this meal. At this point, the vegetables are basically collapsing onto themselves, their deeply-charred flesh resonant with musky flavours. With minor handling, the roasted vegetables are transferred to a blender, buttressed by a bit of stock, and given a good whiz. A generous sprinkling of smoked paprika, salt and pepper brings out the vegetables' deep flavour - and the whole affair is tied together with a helping of cream.

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The recipe for creamy roasted eggplant soup is misleading in its simplicity, like the majority of Julia's entries in The Ultimate One-Pan Oven Cookbook. Julia Konovalova is the brains and beauty behind Imagelicious, a blog initially created to allow its author to explore her obsession with food. After having a daughter, Julia's style changed towards recipes she describes as "mom recipes" - requiring "very little time to cook or prepare. Or can be left in the middle if baby needs attention." My kind of gal.

It helps, of course, that Julia has an effortless charm and a deft hand with a camera and food styling, producing dishes that are not only stunning in their ease, but also in their beauty. Her blog is full of little treasures - and to no surprise, her first cookbook is a perfect encapsulation of her style. 

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The recipes in The Ultimate One-Pan Oven Cookbook are everything Julia's blog is: approachable, hassle-free, and low on clean-up. Most involve one, two stages max, and all make proper use of the oven - the ideal tool for not only getting your food hot on the table, but your house warm at the same time. Each recipe is accompanied by a beautiful photograph and a whimsical write-up by Julia that lets you into her life and family.

Whether you're a busy mother, a harried student, or a passionate cook with a hankering for comforting, beautiful food, you will find something to love - and make! - in The Ultimate One-Pan Oven Cookbook. And thanks to Food Bloggers of Canada and Page Street Publishing, you too can get your very own copy of it! Just enter the giveaway below for your chance to win.

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See more of what I made from The Ultimate One-Pan Oven Cookbook and otherwise on my Instagram stories, on Facebook, and on Twitter and Pinterest. The giveaway will remain open for one week, and a winner will be announced next Saturday, October 28 - so stay tuned on social media to find out! The giveaway is only open to residents of Canada and the United States.

I received no monetary compensation in exchange for this post; however, I did get a review copy of the book for a giveaway (after buying my own! This is how much I love it). I am proud to only work with those companies whose products I truly love. And as always, all opinions expressed here are my own; you can always expect me to be honest with you guys!