Thanks for the advice I will use that in the furure. What I ended up doing was putting two recipes into one. I baked the butternutsquash peeled and seeded and added salt, cayenne pepper and sugar mixed and put on baking sheet in a 500 degree oven for 15 min when that was done added to my beef stew with the other veggies added a couple of glugs of red wine and beef broth and it came out really good. I got the butternut squash recipe from this site. wonderful.

I personally feel the two have a different "flavoring" mechanism. I much prefer vanilla bean ice cream to vanilla. I used nutmeg as a substitute for vanilla beans in a recipe in a sweet recipe. I think in a savory recipe such as this, nutmeg might be a really nice substitution, particularly if you grind it slightly smaller. I don't know the quantity you are dealing with, but I suspect if you check out another squash type of soup recipe...a similar amount would be fine. Most seem to call for between 1/4 tsp and 1/2 going for an essence rather than a nutmeg presence. Let us know what you end up doing. Sounds like a yummy recipe.

Here's a link to a substitute:
http://www.kitchensavvy.com/journal/2005/01/substituting_va.html