Pumpkin Soup for the Soul

This year, the winter season has been very odd. Normally, November and December are colder, cold enough to warrant making soup. Late December and January however have proved me wrong, making things cold and wet and miserable. So I’ve decided to make some soup. Pumpkin soup.

Ingredients

Pumpkin of some sort, with seeds and skin removed
A couple of onions, sliced
Some potatoes, peeled and scrubbed
About 5-6 cloves of garlic, sliced and mushed (not bulbs)
A decent amount of Mixed Spices
A teaspoon of cinnamon, cloves and paprika
One stock cube of your choice
Salt and Pepper, but not too much
A splash of oil
Water

Equipment:

Very large pot
Liquidizer or blender of some sort
A second large pot
Containers for leftover soup
Space to put your containers of leftover soup

Makes: A lot of soup

Instructions

Peel and cut all the vegetables, chopping them into small pieces. Pour the oil into the bottom of your large pot, turn the heat on and add the spices. Throw in all the cut vegetables and give them a quick little sear in the large pot. Once everything has a bit of colour, add enough water to cover all the vegetables in the pot. Add your stock cube, then bring everything to a boil.

Once the mixture is boiling, turn it down to simmer and put the pot’s lid on, so your soup-to-be doesn’t evaporate away.

Cooking times are different for most vegetables, so you’ll want to check on the pot every 10-20 minutes. You can tell that the mixture is ready by using a spoon to squash pumpkin and potato against the side of the pot. If you can mush it with a spoon, then it’s done. Take off the heat, and wait for the soup to cool a little.

You can eat the soup as-is, but we can use a liquidizer to make your soup lump-free. Using the liquidizer, add small amounts of soup at a time, whizz it up and pour it into the second large pot. While liquidizing, use a pulse setting to make sure everything is blended smoothly.

The soup is now ready. Put your soup into various tupperware if you wish to store the soup for later. This mixture lasts about a week in the fridge, and about a month in the freezer. When you reheat the soup, make sure it is piping hot.

A ramble

Honestly, pumpkin soup is somewhat easy to cook. All you are doing is boiling some vegetables and then blending them up. But the nice thing about vegetable soups is that you can put basically any vegetable in the soup and it’ll still end up tasty. However, I like doing pumpkin soup because it blends up nice and, well, I just really like the orange colour of pumpkin that remains, even after adding extra veg.

But you can do a LOT with the basic instructions of this recipe. Can’t get pumpkin? Don’t fancy garlic? Cutting carbohydrates? Then make some soup with the vegetables you do like. The vegetables don’t even need to be fresh, you can use frozen vegetables, just need to wait for them to melt.

At the end of the day, it’s worth making some soup. Not only is it simple, but soup is delicious. That and it’s very easy to store soup and re-heat it for future meals…