Roasted Pumpkin Soup

Seeing as though I’m still on winter break—and I was only scheduled to work 3 days this week, I was feeling quite ambitious last night, and made another soup. I swear this won’t be a regular thing, so please don’t feel overwhelmed by my back-to-back posts; I’m aiming for one a week, once things get rolling this upcoming semester.

Here’s what I used (I should mention that these are approximate measurements):

1 baking pumpkin, roasted, cubed

1 bag of baby carrots, chopped

1 leek, sliced

1 white onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

¼ cup minced ginger root

Heavily poured red wine – probably ½ cup

1 vegetable broth bouillon

5 dashes of “Garlic Hot Sauce”

5 dashed of “Habanero Tabasco Hot Sauce”

7L boiling water

So, when I got home yesterday afternoon I stared down the pumpkin that’s been sitting in the living room since October, and decided to confront my fears—I finally stabbed it with a knife and sliced the darn thing. Once ripping it in two, I pulled out its guts, and sliced it lengthwise. I drizzled olive oil over the slices, and roasted in at 350°F. Hearing the olive oil sizzling after 15ish minutes, I flipped them over and threw some pepper on ‘em. Already, after 15 minutes the flesh had softened, and our single-room-basement-apartment filled with the sweet smell of pumpkin.

After another 10ish minutes I took the pumpkin out of the oven and let it cool. I had high hopes of dressing up in winter wear and walking to the grocery store for a sweet potato to add to the soup, but as the sun fell heavily in the sky, so did my motivation. So I turn to the fridge and rummaged for whatever ingredients we had left. There was a leek, an onion, some garlic, ginger root, and a bag of baby carrots (that desperately needed to be used I might add). I figured this was enough, so I delved into cooking.

I prepared the vegetables as listed above, melted some butter in the big soup pot, and began sautéing the onion and garlic until translucent. They started to brown and stick to the bottom of the pot so I splashed a bit of water in—then I noticed the bottle of red wine left over from New Years, felt a bit adventurous and threw some of that into the pot too. I added the leek, ginger root, vegetable broth bouillon and carrots, stirring them around and let the ingredients soften. I wasn’t satisfied with the amount of ginger, so I minced another portion of the root, and added that as well. I could smell the flavour building, and added another heavy splash of wine.

I felt as though the soup needed some heat so I dashed in Habanero Tabasco sauce, and a new “Garlic Hot Sauce” Nick got for Christmas, topping it all off with some ground black pepper. I held off on adding the pumpkin until last because with the roasting it had already softened quite a bit. So I added the pumpkin cubes at this point; however, for those doing this at home, you could throw in the chunks at anytime. It was finally time to add the boiling water, and let the soup simmer until all of the ingredients were soft, and the broth was flavour filled.

I let the soup simmer for about 40 minutes; the carrots took longer to cook than I had anticipated. Nick sampled the broth and said that it needed another bouillon cube; unfortunately we were out, so this would just have to do. I turned off the heat and let the soup cool before blending it all with the hand blender. I actually got Nick to blend it all because the last time I hand-blended something I burned myself, hence why I let it cool before. The soup was blended until smooth, and we served it up.

We still had some sour-cream left over from a “Nacho Lasagna” experiment I endeavoured in earlier this week, so Nick once again garnished his with some cream, and a dash or two of salt and pepper (I sprinkled some pepper on mine for good luck). The soup was good! It really warmed me up after a cold day. The ginger came through, and it was quite carrot-y. Although I felt that the pumpkin was subtle, Nick said he could really taste it; he also mentioned that the added salt made up for the lack of another bouillon cube. I also wish the wine was more prominent, and that I had added a touch more hot sauce, but overall I was satisfied.

When I made a carrot-ginger soup for my parents’ anniversary I added two cans of coconut milk to make a cream base instead of boiling water—but this time I did not (because #1 I didn’t have any, and #2 I thought that it was a bit too heavy with the coconut milk before). But there is plenty of time for a coconut base in the future, stay tuned.

But that was that; overall I felt it was a success, and we still have some leftovers for lunch. If anyone wants to come for dinner next time, please come!

Thank you for reading!