Perfect Pumpkin Soup

Marco: You just gotta love winter comfort food!

Hannah whipped up a delicious pumpkin soup the other night.

I can never have pumpkin soup again if it's not topped with crumbled fetta, toasted pine nuts and sesame seeds and fresh rocket! Delicious!

Hannah: I love pumpkin soup, but find that too many recipes are either just boiled pumpkin with loads of cream or so many things added, you hardly taste the pumpkin. So as I wanted to make something healthy and delicious my plan was: heaps of pumpkin, a good stock and some onion and garlic for flavour. The added fetta, pine nuts and rocket at the end were just inspired at the last minute from looking in the fridge!

Roast pumpkin is my absolute favourite – it makes the pumpkin super sweet and gives it a nice rich flavour! So, after drizzling some good olive oil in a roasting tray, I cut a whole butternut pumpkin into 1-2 inch chunks, chucked in 2 whole cloves of garlic (peeled – these also go super sweet) and roughly chopped up a whole onion. Everything can be rough, because it’ll all be blended up in the end.

So, while that was roasting away (I think I did it for about 1 ½ hours on 180deg), I made a simple chicken veggie stock. I love making stocks, because if you have a good one, it will make your meal amazing! So, considering that I put garlic and onion in with the pumpkin, I only used one clove of garlic and half an onion in the stock, I slowly caramelised these together. Then I just chucked in what I had in the fridge (too lazy to walk to the shops on such a cold day) which was: one carrot, one celery stick (with leaves) and one tomato. I kept the quantities small because it’s all about the pumpkin after all! I fried these off for just a minute or two with the onion and garlic then poured in about 1 ½ litres of boiling water and a teaspoon of powdered chicken stock. Then I just let this sizzle away until the pumpkin was finished roasting.

I let both the pumpkin and the stock cool down for about 20 mins then chucked it all in the blender. But, because I like it thick, I ended up not over doing the blending or the stock quantity, so it was smooth but nice and thick. Then, when we were ready to eat, I heated up the blended mixture in a big pot – do this slowly though, because otherwise it boils and plops everywhere (I made quite a mess). I quickly dry-fried some pine nuts, crumbled a little bit of fetta and a small handful of rocket on top – and it was yum! Perfect for winter!

Cheers,
Hannah