Pumpkin soup for quick recovery

Firstly, my apologies for the lack of updates over the last few days. My wife and I have been down with the flu, which our housemate brought in. So we've been sleeping and resting as much as possible to get better sooner!

sacrificing Health, for our health!

Important for fast recovery of any disease is good food. Most people who are not feeling well want something comforting (usually warm) and easy to consume. What their body wants is similar, but it probably wants good nutrition and something easily digestible. Soups fit this criteria well.

Porky before the chopping began

So today, I decided to make our pumpkin soup. As I wrote previously, we have so much pumpkin that we'd need to have at least one every day to finish them all off by spring (which is when they will probably start to go bad—they store for up to three to four months in ideal conditions).

I chose Porky and Health, two that were most damaged. (See this post for why this happened.) I usually only need one pumpkin to make a soup, but I felt I wanted to try making more so that we can keep drinking this over more days and get better sooner. Porky was 1.5kg. Health was 2.6kg, almost double in size. Larger pumpkins have the benefit (usually) of having less seeds compared to edible parts.

a hole in the bad bit of Porky

my knife skills need a bit of work

 I noticed from many days ago that the rotten, soft bit on Porky had a hole in the middle. Several other bad bits had this hole. I was concerned that an insect might have gone in, but thankfully, I found out today that it was in fact not a sign of some insect entering the pumpkin. It's still a mystery what actually creates this hole. Click on the picture on the left to zoom in.

halved, with seeds showing

Peeling the pumpkin is actually quite tiring. I sharped my knife at the start, but it wasn't good enough and half way through I could feel it was blunt already.

seeds and fleshy bits

 After peeling them and chopping them in half, I removed the stringing, dark-coloured bits, including the seeds. I've learnt not to put pumpkin seeds into my bokashi—they sprout even when it's been fermented with EM bacteria and buried 30 cm deep! I was left with two very substantial, solid, and fresh-looking bits of pumpkin to chop into small pieces. What fun it is to cut them into pieces.

peeled, halved, and seeds gone

 Baking the pumpkins before blending it into a soup makes it sweeter, I reckon. It dehydrates the pumpkin, but also caramelises the sugars. My wife did some quick research online and suggested that I drizzle olive oil all over it and add a few cloves of garlic. Add a bit of salt and pepper (not too much of the latter, because it's going to be blended into my soup). I don't think we baked the pumpkins in the post-PhD thesis soup that I made, which I talked about in my very first post on this blog.

chopped Porky, before baking

Porky, baked and caramelised; yum!

 I baked it at about 180°C (our oven temperature is definitely higher than it says, so it's always a guess what temperature it really is), for about 30 mins. When I baked it the second time round (two trays, Health), it took a bit longer and I turned up the temperature at the end to get more caramelisation.

There was no chicken soup left from our previous cooking as a soup base, so we used a bouillon cube instead. Yes, I know it's sort of cheating. But the main flavour definitely didn't come from the cube. It was all this pumpkin … about three kilos of it, plus the garlic cloves (about 10 in total), onions (two small ones, also baked to start with), and a few celery stalks chopped into 2cm slices. I also put in one carrot, which was cooked up in a mixture of cold water and the baked pumpkins, for about 15 mins, until soft.

3 kg of pumpkin almost fills our Le Creuset pot

In retrospect, ten cloves of garlic was a bit too overpowering in this soup. The celery added little flavour but left some stringy bits in the soup, which our blender failed to break. So next time no celery, or at least chop it into smaller chunks before adding.

remaining ingredients added: onion, celery, carrots

 Once the carrots were soft, I blended everything until reaching a smooth consistency. I had to transfer the soup to a larger container, as you can see in the photos. You can also tell that the volume increased a lot after the blending: this is because I added a lot of water to the mixture. Gluggy pumpkin soup is not really a soup, but more like a paste. Furthermore, it's very difficult to blend the large chunks when there's not enough water content. Even after adding about 2–3L of water, the stringy celery bits, as I mentioned above, did not get blended.

To serve this soup (for 2 people), we took out about 6 ladles of this mixture and added some more flavours. Two large scoops of sour cream made the soup smoother and creamier. My wife also adde some mixed herbs to give it a better flavour. For some protein, I put on some sliced pieces of lamb—leftovers from last night's dinner. I didn't need to heat the lamb. It got warmed up by the soup. Garnish with some coriander. And that's it, a small, light dinner. Oh, I forgot to mention: two small bread rolls, which I burnt in the oven. Hehe.

the final dish: rosat pumpkin and vegetable soup, topped with slices of roast lamb

I wish I had a white bowl for the final photo. The soup was actually more orange in colour than the bowl, which is more of a yellow colour.