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Alicorn comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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Dump vegetables into a pot. Pour in water or stock until it reaches the same level as the veggies (less if you plan to add cream, more if you're nervous about burning it, less if you want thick goopy soup and more if you want thin soup). Put it on a stove burner, turn it up to High, stir at least once to prevent stuff from sticking to the bottom, and check on the smooshability of the vegetables every 5-10 minutes. Add more water if the vegetables are still unsmooshable and the water level has gotten significantly lower.
The only reason this would matter would be if you use a short-handled spoon, you will have to have your hand much closer to the boiling water, which is physically uncomfortable. Otherwise the spoon could be wooden, plastic, metal, slotted or not, whatever.
I definitely wouldn't use the disposable plastic spoons that fast food places give out with their food. Those might actually melt, especially if pressed against the side of a hot metal pot.
While I wouldn't prefer a fast-food-place plastic spoon, I don't think it would be in danger of melting in this specific case. Boiling water is a fixed temperature and it will stay that temperature until the water is all boiled off, if I understand it correctly; and the spoon doesn't spend much time pressed against the pot itself, since the idea is to smoosh a vegetable between spoon and pot.
The pot itself can't get hotter than boiling either, as long as there's a bunch of water in it. (This, btw, is how rice cookers detect when the rice is done.)
The inside of the pot can't get significantly hotter than ... right, he water just turns gas phase more rapidly.
It won't melt, but depending on the type of plastic it might become too soft and flexible to be useful for vegetable smooshing. From experience, some types of plastic spoons become too soft to even support their own weight when placed in boiling water.