Fall Into a Savory Soup

After traveling in New York for several days to attend a Verizon Summit (#vzsummit), and enjoying meals at fabulous restaurants there, I returned, craving home made comfort food.

Just before the trip, I roasted a pretty sizable pumpkin (uncarved), yielding a two large sheet pans of delicious pieces of roasted pumpkin.

So before heading into Alki Surf Shop on Saturday, I searched for a pumpkin soup recipe, and found one that looked good, but I didn’t have some of the ingredients.

Never one to let a missing ingredient stop me, I forged on!

The original recipe, Thai Pumpkin Soup with Coconut Milk, called for lemongrass, fresh coriander, vegetable stock and coconut milk. But I didn’t have any of those things. So here’s what I did:

Terri’s Pantry Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients:

2 TB Olive Oil
1.5 medium onions, diced
5 cloves of garlic left whole
3.5 lbs. of roasted pumpkin, diced*
1 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp curry powder
2 TB fresh minced ginger** (which BTW, was frozen—more below)
zest of half a lemon

Stock - Ingredients:

4 cups water plus 4 chicken bouillon cubes
1/4 tsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp onion power
1/4 garlic powder

I’d already roasted the pumpkin and had it on hand, and as anyone who likes roasted vegetables knows, it's the most flavorful way to eat veggies. All you have to do is coat your veggies with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, than place on cookie sheets for about an hour at 450 degrees. OMG.

Soup Directions:

Heat the oil in a large stock pot, dump in the garlic and onions, and sauté until translucent Add chopped pumpkin, minced ginger, 1 tsp of coriander and 2 tsp of curry, and cook for about 5 minutes. It will look sort of mushy.

Dissolve 4 chicken bouillon cubes in a quart of warm water, then add 1/4 tsp onion powder; 1/4 tsp garlic powder; and 1/4 tsp ground coriander to the stock. (Since I didn’t have vegetable stock (in the original recipe) and had just used the last 4 cans of chicken stock to make pumpkin soup earlier this week, this was a workaround.)

Dump the stock into the pumpkin mixture and bring to a boil. Simmer for 30 minutes, then add the zest of 1/2 lemon

The cool part! My adorable sister gave me a immersion stick blender a few years ago. Since then, I bought another, and another and have gifted four of them to family and friends. I LOVE THEM!

Does it Blend?

You bet! In the stockpot, if you have a stick blender, just BLEND IT. In a few minutes, you have an amazing, rich soup. And since I skipped adding the coconut milk listed in the original recipe, I have to think it has a whole lot fewer calories. SIMPLY YUMMY! Give it a try, or give me a shout with any questions and I'll do my best to answer.

BONUS STUFF

*Roasted Pumpkin

Wash, core (save the seeds!) and cut up the pumpkin into chucks. Mine were around 5-6” in size. Coat the pieces with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper Single layer on cookie sheet(s) place into a 450 degree oven for about an hour. The fleshy part of the pumpkin with be fork tender. Peel the skin and chop up. I even eat the pumpkin with a bit of butter as a (sort of bland) side dish.

**Ginger trick!

I always store ginger root in the freezer. It keeps beautifully. For this recipe, I took a chunk that came to about 2 TB, and microwaved it for 30 seconds, turned it and gave it another 30. The skin just slid off! I then julienned, then minced.