Pumpkin Soup

So... in my quest to eat healthy food, I have realised that (or rather my homeopath made me realise) soups are a good thing to add to my diet. 

Now I don't like the regular soups. If I am going to have soup, I better have interesting soups. I am thinking more along the lines of broth or clear soups with loads of vegetables and meat. Something that I can have as an entire meal. I am not about to go sit through my entire evening cooking a three or even a two course meal. What I am also trying to do is get a little bit of prep done so that on the next couple of days I don't have a lot to do.

So the other day I baked a pineapple upside down cake. No, I am not going to put up the recipe because, it's not my recipe. (As the oven was on already, after baking the cake I roasted pumpkins and cauliflower - separately). Not that the recipes I put up here are completely my original. I love food and have been looking up recipes for things to make for ages. I love cook books and cooking shows. My earliest memory of a cooking show is of Yan Can Cook where Yan chopped up a cucumber at the speed of lightning. I remember being in absolute awe!

My cooking process is as follows:

• I either think of an ingredient or a style of cooking and start thinking of what it would taste like.
• Then, I look up different recipes online (remember the goal is always to make it simple).
• Now obviously, I live in India and we don't always get t
  
  he ingredients we want (the obvious part would be me not getting the ingredients). I even had to find a substitute for sour cream. So now you know.
• Then I make changes, try and make the recipe more simple and make it at home.
• So these are the recipes that are going to be posted on this blog.
• Or else there will only be pics of things I made

So coming to pumpkin soup, when I was thinking of something substantial I thought of pumpkin soup. And this is how you do it people...

We need

• Pumpkin (chopped), quantity depends on the number of people. So for two big bowls of this teaming hot soup, I decided that I would use about 500 gms of pumpkin (without the seeds and stuff)
• Onion - one small peeled and quartered
• Garlic - just a few cloves whole
• Olive oil (depending how much oil you wanna put) - I put about 2 tablespoons of it
• And cracked pepper and salt ( try sea salt, its cheap and definitely brings something different to the table.

For the soup, I took the washed and chopped pumpkins, onion and garlic and put them on a baking tray. I drizzled the olive oil and salt all over them. I baked it in my oven for about 45 minutes on 220 C. Actually the oven time completely depends on your oven. If you look up online a lot of chefs roast the veggies on that temperature. I kept the pumpkins in the oven till I felt they were cooked through. This can easily be done a day ahead. Something I mentioned earlier.

Once the pumpkins cooled down, I put them in the blender (along with the onion and the garlic) and blended away. In Indian households we generally don't have stock and so its okay to put in just plain old water. The pumpkins and the onion and garlic have great flavour in them.

I then put the pureed pumpkin mixture in a thick bottomed sauce pan (and this is because I am clumsy and I don't want to burn the damn thing). I brought the mixture to a boil, let it simmer for about 5 minutes and it was ready to eat. Now, you can add more water if you think its too thick, but remember to cook it through every time you add water (I just make sure that it boils). The consistency should not be too watery.

And that's that. You can serve the soup hot hot, with perhaps garlic bread. I think that would be a great meal on its own!