Creature Comforts

It is a cold and rainy day in The North, so I decided to warm up by making soup for lunch. Homemade soup is one of the best feel-good foods around. It's wholesome, it's warm, and with a few slices of thick bread iced with salted butter (gotta be salted), it can be a hearty lunch. 

Curry-Pumpkin Soup

2 Tablespoons butter

1 medium onion

1 clove garlic

1 Tablespoon curry powder

2 cups pumpkin

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1 bay leaf

3 cups vegetable or chicken stock

Salt and pepper to taste

1 cup milk

In a large pot saute the chopped onion and garlic in butter until translucent. Add curry powder and stir until onion and garlic are coated. Add pumpkin, nutmeg and bay leaf. Stir in broth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 15-20 minutes. Season further with salt and pepper to your taste. Stir in milk and allow to simmer for another 5 minutes.

In the fall I love to make the soup with fresh pumpkin, although I only had canned today so that's what I used. To bake fresh pumpkin, I cut it in half, remove the innards and seeds, lay the halves in a dish skin-side up with a bit of water in the bottom. Bake at 400 degrees Celcius for about an hour (it varies depending on the size of the pumpkin); you'll know when it's done when you can cut a knife through it like butter. I think this year I'll cook up a whole bunch of pumpkin flesh and then cube and freeze it so that I won't have to buy so much canned stuff (especially since the grocery store is 2 hours away!). Also, I always save the pumpkin seeds, rinse them and then drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle on some celery salt or cajun spice. Toasted in the oven, they make a smart garnish tossed in the individual soup bowls or can be eaten by the handful as a yummy and nutritious snack.

Today, I added some diced carrots with the onions and garlic because I had a few extra lying around, but not too many because then the carrot taste would overpower the pumpkin flavour. Also if the carrots are not cut small enough or cooked through enough they'll still be a bit crunchy so the soup will need to be blended a bit (I need an immersion blender!). I toasted a few pumpkin seeds for the garnish, although I burnt them slightly while running Reina outside. Ah, puppies. Sigh. 

On that note, I've found one of the things that our new little Northerner loves most about rainy days...

 

 ...my rubber boots!