Celebrating thesis submission with pumpkin soup

Today, I submitted my PhD thesis, after more than five years of intellectual labour. To celebrate, I made a 'garden soup' with my wife.

The main ingredients were:

• 15 tomatoes (beefsteak, russian black, and green zebra)
• one large 2.3kg Walthum butternut pumpkin (called Star Trek)
• 3 onions, 8 garlic cloves, and 2 carrots (roasted)
• home-made chicken stock diluted in half (about 2 litres after dilution)
• 1/8 cabbage chopped
• sugar (as our pumpkin was not very sweet)
• fresh thyme 
• happiness
• time

Of these, the tomatoes and pumpkin were grown in our plot. :)

The recipe was based on Pam's recipe (from 'For the Love of Cooking' blog). But we made a few variations, including substituting kale with cabbage because our kale plants aren't ready for eating yet.

Peeling Star Trek, our biggest pumpkin so far

The first step was to peel the pumpkin. 'Star Trek', as you can see, had a bit of a surface scaring, which is why we brought him home before the others. As we suspected, the inside was perfectly fine. We wanted to put the pumpkin in the oven as soon as early as possible because it needed the most time.

For our chicken stock base, we used a stock we made earlier with boned chicken pieces and some ginseng. (Basically, it was just 10 lovely legs, which are skinless drumsticks with the long bone chopped off, cooked on low heat for 2 hours with a tablespoon of American ginseng flakes.)

Once peeled, I removed all the seeds and chopped it into small pieces. Because there was so much pumpkin in relation to the rest of the vegetables, we decided to also blend some of the pumpkin to give the soup a pumpkin-soup texture.

our tomatoes, and bought carrots and onions, before baking

I then cut up our tomatoes. I have had them sitting on the dining table for about 4 weeks!! It's amazing that most of them lasted so long. Before I knew better, I used to store my supermarket tomatoes in the fridge to keep them longer. I only realised this was wrong after reading websites and talking to farmers at my local farmers market. Those that got damaged were mainly due to worms that had attacked during the rain. But most of them were fine and unaffected, although they were soft (i.e., really ripe!). Meanwhile, my wife cut up the onion and carrot pieces.

This is how they looked after baking them, as well as pumpkins, at around 190°C.

our tomatoes, and bought carrots and onions, after baking

We then popped the tomatoes, onions, garlic, and around half the pumpkin into our pre-made chicken stock and blended it with our trusty Bamix. Added lots of salt, sugar, thyme (harvested from our pots) and pepper.

 Finally, we added in chopped cabbage that we bought at the Belconnen Fresh Food Market on the same day. My wife did the flavouring bit, adding more salt, sugar, and spices to blend all the flavours together.

cabbage added

We enjoyed this soup with the 'rustic loaf' bread at Knead Patisserie (one of my wife's favourite breads in Canberra; it has a lovely chewy dense texture, and is made with wholegrain rye goodness). To top it off, I relaxed with a glass and a half of a merlot sparking champagne (Anderson), a gift from my PhD supervisor.

I wish I could let my readers taste this soup. ;) The photos will have to do for now! We shared this soup with my supervisor as well as with two friends in Canberra.

So there you have it, my first blog post on my cooking experiences (my wife did most of the real cooking, I'm just the sous chef in charge of cutting and washing things).

final soup, delicious home-made goodness.

 Bon appetit!