Pumpkin Recipes: Creamy Soup and Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

So it’s still ‘almost’ Halloween – which means pumpkin-craze is still totally a thing and, because I wanted to carve a pumpkin and also really like to eat pumpkin in general: here are some ideas as to what you can do when you’ve carved your pumpkin!:

So let’s get cooking!

First things first: I only have the (pretty crappy) camera of my phone, so I do apologise if the qualities of these pictures isn’t up to par.

Anyways, first things first: what we’re going to be making exactly is a creamy pumpkin soup and toasted pumpkin seeds – so we’re going to be multi-tasking (but you can, of course, make just one of these as well). For this you will need:

the flesh and stringy bits of 1 large pumpkin
1 leek
1 large yellow onion
1/2 l milk
1l beef (or vegetable) stock
the seeds from 1 pumpkin
herbs to taste

as well as:

1 big cooking pot (I used one that could hold 5l and it was just about right)
2 small cooking pots
1 oven tray
hand blender

1. For starters: pre-heat your oven to 180°C.

2. Put your pumpkin seeds into one of the small cooking pots and cover them water, bring the water to a boil.

2. Cut up your leek into chunky slices and put these into the other small cooking pot, cover these in water and bring this to a boil as well

I cut up more than one leek, obviously, I needed some for dinner as well 🙂

3. While you’re waiting for the water to boil, peel and cut your onion, melt a bit of butter (or olive oil) in the biggest cooking pot and glaze your onions

4. By this point, both small pots of water should be boiling – leave the one with leek for another couple of minutes, while you drain, rinse and put into your oven scale the pumpkin seeds. You want to put these into your pre-heated for 3 minutes, so they are completely dry.

5. At this point, your onions will be glazed – you can now add the leek (drained) and the flesh and stringy bits of pumpkin, as well as your beef (or vegetable) stock and bring it to a boil. As soon as it’s boiling, lower your fire to medium and let it simmer away.

6. As I said, we’re multi-tasking here, so now you want to take your pumpkin seeds out of the oven, and sprinkle them with whatever herbs you want – I went with olive oil, paprika powder and sea salt (because I wanted to sprinkle them on my soup when I served it) but there are a bunch of other delicious possibilities, both sweet and savoury (honey and cinnamon; garlic powder and sea salt, etc.)

Then, put the pumpkin seeds back into the oven for 10 minutes – you do want to keep an eye on them for the last couple of minutes, though, because they tend to go from ‘almost done’ to ‘burnt’ in a couple of seconds or less…

7. You’re soup’s been simmering for a couple of minutes now, so you can add your milk (or non-lactose replacement!) and let it simmer for another 5 minutes.

At this point, you want to take your soup of the fire and blend it until smooth. Bring your soup back to a boil and sneak a taste – if it’s not to your liking, season your soup further. Turn off your fire and let the soup cool down.

8. By now, your pumpkin seeds should be ready, so you can take them out of the oven and let them cool down – mine looked like this:

Now all you need to do is serve – this is the point where I forgot to take a picture (of course I did) but I basically just scooped my soup into a bowl while it was nice and hot, poured a little bit of cream into it and then sprinkled some of the pumpkin seeds on top of it – for that nice crunch, you know?

And I’ve got to tell you: it was delicious!

So there you have it, a nice, creamy pumpkin soup and pumpkin seeds! Be sure to let me know below if you’ve made this (and how you liked it!) as well as any ‘improvements’ you might have – I love to experiment with my ‘staple recipes’, so it’d be much appreciated!

-Saar