Abercrombie & Feast

And… away we go.  Here’s the first recipe of our week of exploring The River Cottage Year.  I thought it was only fitting to start with one of my all-time favourite foods.  SOUP!  Specifically, roasted pumpkin or squash soup. 

I’ve never made pumpkin soup before. To be painfully honest, I don’t really like pumpkin soup.  It’s usually too sweet.  Pumpkins are sweet enough on their own, but then people put things like cinnamon and vanilla into pumpkin soup and it ends up tasting like a bowl of melted pumpkin pie.  Soup should not taste like pie.  I feel strongly about this.

Despite my previous reservations about pumpkin soup I gave this recipe a go, for a few reasons:
1. This recipe contains roasted garlic. There is pretty much nothing in the world that is not improved by adding some roasted garlic. Except, maybe bubble gum.
2. The pumpkins at the farmers market looked so gorgeous and knobbly and bumpy. I just had to bring a few home with me to hack into small pieces.
3. There’s nothing sweet added to this recipe. No cinnamon, no vanilla, not even a trace of nutmeg. Score!
4. This recipe seemed very easy and I didn’t want to tackle some huge project late on a Sunday night. I love you guys, but I love watching football with my husband more.

The soup turned out pretty well, actually. It was sweet, but it was pumpkin sweet, not pie sweet… so that was ok. It was creamy without having any cream added, which is brilliant. And the colour was gawgeous… a creamy pale orange, like the inside of a cream-sicle.

And now confession time. I followed Hugh’s recipe to the letter and tasted a sample before serving it. The soup was lovely just as Hugh intended it. A creamy blend of roasted pumpkin, hot chicken stock and roasted garlic. But, the thing was, I wanted more flavour… more strong, savoury flavour. So, like a rebel with a hungry husband, I added a few quick dashes of cumin to the soup after blending, but before reheating it.

I liked the soup before adding the cumin. I loved the soup after adding the cumin. The cumin added a smoky flavour that balanced beautifully with the sweet pumpkin. When I make this again (and I totally will, it’s easy and healthy and yum), I’ll shake a bit of cumin over the pumpkin as it roasts and then just follow the recipe from there.

Oh!  I just remembered another confession.  Damn.  There was I was thinking I’d only altered the recipe a little tiny bit.  But, in The River Cottage Year the recipe called for thinly sliced slivers of garlic to be fried and sprinkled over the soup before serving.  Well, I tried this twice, burned the garlic twice, said some words I would not say in front of my mother, stomped my foot a little bit and gave up.  Instead, I threw  few sage leaves in the frying pan and topped the soup with fried sage leaves.  Sorted.

Roast pumpkin soup
Adapted from The River Cottage Year

Serves 4

1 medium pumpkin or 2 small squash (I used one butternut squash and 1 acorn squash)
4 cloves of garlic, with their skins on
2 tbs olive oil + more for frying
salt and pepper
2 tsp ground cumin
1 litre chicken stock
8 small sage leaves

Preheat your oven to gas mark 5 (180C, 350F.)  While the oven is preheating, cut your pumpkin to large chunks.  No need to peel!  Just remove the slimy fibers and the seeds from the centre. 

Place the chunks of pumpkin in a large roasting tin.  Drizzle with 2 tbs olive oil, 2 tsp ground cumin and salt and pepper to taste.  Scatter the cloves of garlic around the tin.  Toss together so the pieces and the garlic are coated. 
Roast the pumpkin and garlic for 35-40 minutes, or until tender and nicely browned.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool enough to touch.  Then, using a spoon, scrape the pumpkin flesh from the skins.  Squeeze the garlic cloves out of their skins and add them, along with the pumpkin, to a blender or food processor. 

Heat the chicken stock in a large pan. 

Add enough stock to cover the pumpkin pieces to the food processor and liquidise until completely smooth.  You may have to do this in batches.  Once the soup is liquid, you can adjust the consistency.  Add more stock if you like a thinner soup.  I like this soup to be nice and thick.

Once you have the consistency you want, put the soup into a pot and heat over medium low heat without letting the soup boil. 

While the soup is reheating, warm up olive oil in a small frying pan.  Add the sage leaves to the hot oil and allow to fry for approximately 10-15 seconds.  Remove with a slotted spoon and allow to drain on papertowel.

Serve the soup hot, with fried sage leaves and an extra twist or two of black pepper.