Spicy pumpkin soup! with Southwestern flavors of chipotle, cumin, oregano, and served with pepitas, crema fresca, and cilantro.

Photography Credit: Elise Bauer

This year on Halloween, in my typical do-it-at-the-last-possible-moment approach, I set out to find a carving pumpkin in the afternoon only to find all of the local stores completely sold out.

So, instead I bought some sort of heirloom fairy tale pumpkin from Whole Foods.

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It wasn’t even orange, but some terribly un-Halloween grey color. My attempts to carve it were laughable. The flesh was at least 3 inches thick.

I did finally manage to carve something resembling a face, but it was so pathetic I ended up chucking the whole thing in the oven and baking it at 350 for a couple hours. (I think it’s almost impossible to overcook a pumpkin.)

Obviously this pumpkin was meant for eating, not for entertaining trick-or-treaters.

What to do with 8 cups of cooked pumpkin?

Make pumpkin soup, of course!

While we already have several pumpkin soup recipes on the site, we were missing one with more of a Southwestern feel. I’m delighted with how this soup turned out. It’s smokey and spicy from the chipotle chiles, cumin and oregano.

The soup is creamy enough just with the pumpkin purée and stock that it doesn’t needed added cream or milk, though some crema fresca or sour cream is a soothing addition as a garnish to balance the heat of the chipotles.

The touch that will put a smile on your face as you eat the soup is the addition of toasted shelled pumpkin seeds, called pepitas in Mexican cooking. Their crunchiness is a happy contrast to the smoothness of the soup.