Spicy, but not hot. There are no chillies in this recipe. My mate Paul has a hand in this. He's a vegetarian too, and after hearing that he was quite a good cook, I cornered him on the issue one evening in the pub. 'When ur ye gonny show me some of you recipes?' I demanded, to which he agreed to share a bit of his knowledge sometime. We sat and gassed on a bit more about veggie cooking and he let the intelligence slip that he likes to put a bit of apple in pumpkin soup when he makes it. Fair enough! I thought. That sounds alright. I wanted to see him do that recipe, but we were all busy over the coming weeks, then I ended up in South east Asia while he headed off to India for a couple of months and the pumpkins got forgotten. Well, not not quite forgotten, because when I was in Hong Kong, the idea of pumpkin soup came to the fore again. I met my daughter for lunch in a wee place in Central called Kozmo. She works at a dance studio not far from there and it does some nice veggie snacks, so it seemed like a good choice.
Hong Kong is a place where you get quite used to meeting Asian guys serving in restaurants who speak really good English, but in Kozmo we were served by a young European fellow who spoke really good Cantonese. I have to say that was a first. Apart from that, however, Kozmo wasny much different from many of other quick lunch places in Central Hong Kong - mostly a lot of over-priced sandwiches. They had over-priced juice too. I had a detox blend because I figured I needed it; it was a blend of cucumber and some other green stuff and cost me 30 KH bucks. Tasted quite good. But that's going off the point. Pumpkin soup. That's what we started talking about. It was on the menu and described as a healthy tonic (it's that kind of cafe): spicy pumpkin soup with cinnamon, nutmeg and black pepper. No mention of apple, but those are all spices that go well with apple, so I thought, 'Wow, I'm going to have that idea and throw in a bit of apple to make a new recipe'. And that's what I did - a kind of Ashy-Paul-Kozmo pumpkin soup. Except in the end I used apple juice because had that and didn't have the fresh fruit.
Now, I'm thinking that if apples goes well with pumpkin, so will cider. And not just any old cider. We need some sour, strong, smelly old scrumpy for this and I just know it's going to make magic pumpkin soup, but it will have to wait till I visit Somerset or Devon. Maybe someone else will try it after reading this? Please let me know how it goes.
Here's enough soup for 4 bowls.
500g of pumpkin
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
A little grated nutmeg
A piece of cinnamon stick
A few crushed black peppercorns
A veggie stock cube or equivalent
A little salt
Olive oil
About 1.5 litres of water
Peel and chop the pumpkin - it doesn't really matter how you chop it as it will soften and begin to disintegrate as it cooks. Chop the onion and garlic finely and give them a quick saute in some olive oil. Just cook them until they go transparent. Add the pumpkin and water to the pan and bring to the boil. Add the stock cube, a small glass of apple juice and the cinnamon and reduce to a simmer and cover the pan.
When the pumpkin begins to soften so that you can easily stick a fork in it, add the remaining spices and a little salt to taste. Cook for another few minutes and serve.
You can blend this soup if you like, or do what I did and just crush some of the larger pieces of pumpkin and leave the soup quite chunky.