The gift of an enormous pumpkin has left me scrabbling around for pumpkin recipes. Pumpkin and potato mash for Gastrobaby only made a small indentation, so next up was pumpkin soup. I considered an array of flavour combinations before hitting on caraway and ginger. If you’re not keen on caraway, you could try cardamom, ginger and nutmeg/cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg for a sweeter soup, or reference Indian flavours with cumin and ginger/cumin and mustard seed. Or for a South East Asian twist, throw some lemongrass, chilli, ginger and garlic in a food processor to make a paste and replace the double cream with coconut milk.
This soup is incredibly straightforward to make with very little chopping, allowing me to keep half an eye on Gastrobaby shuffling his way across the kitchen floor. I roasted the pumpkin, partly to add flavour, partly because that way seemed less labour intensive!
Ingredients
800g pumpkin
1 onion
1 tsp caraway seeds
30g fresh ginger, grated or finely chopped
750ml vegetable stock
salt and pepper to season
2 tbsp double cream
1. Begin by slicing the pumpkin into wedges, place these on a baking tray and put them in the oven, preheated at 180. Check these after about 20 mins, they should be soft and just beginning to turn brown at the edges.
2. Whilst the pumpkin roasts, chop the onion and saute on a low heat in a knob of butter for 10 mins, or until soft.
3. Grind the caraway seeds with a pestle and mortar then add to the onions along with the ginger. Continue to saute for a few minutes.
4. Add the roasted pumpkin and the stock and simmer for 5 minutes. Blend before seasoning to taste, then stir in the cream.
We ate this with soda bread, which can be made in under an hour. It can be difficult to find buttermilk, so I followed Gin and Crumpets’ recipe which substitutes a mixture of yoghurt and milk.
gastromummy 