The beauty of autumn: BEST roast pumpkin soup

Because it is not December yet, I am still allowing myself to post about pumpkin. To be honest, so far whenever I looked at this photo, it made me want pumpkin soup. I think I may be a bit obsessed with pumpkin – I even get things delivered to my house with the word pumpkin in the address field!

Anyway… This recipe has never failed and I have had this many times. If you don’t even cook on a regular basis, you should have most ingredients, apart from, maybe, pumpkin. Of course, if you live in England, you would probably use butternut squash, a cousin of pumpkin. It’s all relative.

Ingredients

1 butternut squash/pumpkin, about 1kg
2 tbsp oil
1 tbsp butter
2 onions, chopped
1 garlic clove, chopped
2 chillies, chopped
850ml hot vegetable stock
4 tbsp sour cream (crème fraîche)

Preparation:

1) If you live in the woods, heat your open-fire to ‘very hot’. Or if you live a more convenient kind of life just heat your oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 6.

2) You can choose from two difficulty levels :

*QUICKIE- Cut the whole squash into cubes, discard the seeds , then toss in a large roasting tin with oil, salt and pepper OR

*THE BOSS- Cut the top of the squash off, discard the seeds, carve the inside of the squash. Then toss the flesh AND the ‘bowl’ with oil, salt and pepper on a large roasting tin.This way you can actually serve the soup in the same pumpkin, and eat the pumpkin later. LIKE A BOSS.

3) Roast for 30 mins, turning once during cooking, until golden and soft. You can also roast the whole seeds with the same batch: just season, add oil and some chilli. I like to have it “can-you-please-pass-me-a-tissue spicy”.

4) While the squash cooks, melt the butter with the remaining oil in a large saucepan, then add the onions, garlic and chilli. Cover and cook on a very low heat for 10 mins until the onions are completely soft.

5) Once the oven works are done, add the squash cubes to the saucepan together with the stock and sour cream, and simmer until required consistency is reached – I like my soups thick and not too creamy. If you want it silky smooth, just put everything into a blender for a few seconds.

6) Add the puree into the hollow pumpkin, and sprinkle with the spicy seeds.

7) For your next online purchase add “Crazy Pumpkin Man Ltd” as your second line of address for extra pumpkinness.