Pumpkin soup, or Annalena give up the can

One of Annalena's basic rules of the kitchen is: make it yourself UNLESS: the effort involved, relative to the product, is so high that it doesn't make sense to make it yourself. Corollary to this: if you can buy it as a natural product, better than you can make it yourself, at a reasonable price, buy it. This is why Annalena does not make her own pasta, but makes her own bread. It's why she makes her own ice cream, but buys candy. And it has been why , for pumpkin, Annalena has relied on canned organic stuff for years.
Have any of you out there ever COOKED a pumpkin? If you did, how long did it take to recover from the burns, the cuts, and how many times did you say, out loud or in silence "never again?" Hmmmm. I see some shaking of heads in acknowledgement there. Those of you who may be made of strong stuff, might have switched to things like butternut or acorn squash, and gave up cooking pumpkin alltogether. I bet I know why: you used those big "jack o'lantern" pumpkins. Annalena knows: you get so much water, after way too much effort in cutting this big mosnter vegetbale down to a small, reasonable size. Then it bakes forever. You get massive amounts of liquid that spill. You then have to wait forever for it to cool, and by the time you scrape the skin away, and collect the stringy, messy pulp.. then you look at the cans of organic pumpkin at 2 bucks each and decide it's worth it.

I was in that camp. Until this weekend. Filled with a sense of ambition that I rarely have, I decided to give it a shot, with a smaller version of pumpkin: the so-called "cheese" or "milk" pumpkin. Google them for a picture. Where jack o lanterns are most certainly orange, these pumpkins are beige. They are also much smaller. A medium to large one, is probably about five pounds. Yes, the skin is still thick, but nowhere near as thick as the standard variety. And a five pound pumpkin will give you about 3 cups of pulp. Still skimpy, but... what you'll find is that the product is much paler, and much gentler than what you can buy. SO, let's cook some pumpkin.

Get a five pound milk/cheese pumpkin. Get your heaviest knife and cut down, vertically, to get two halves. Then, hack the halves into manageable pieces. Dont' worry about evenness or anything else, just chunk it up. Then, lay them on a parchment lined baking sheet, cover the whole thing with foil, and put it in a 400 degree oven and walk away for an hour. Yup, it still takes a while, and yup, you will still have to wait until it cooks, when it comes out of the oven. The pulp, however, is very thick, and you will not get the tons of liquid that you may have experienced. The skin will peel away easily when it's cool. Then just put all that pulp in a blender and puree it. You will get a wonderful pale pink vegetable.

You can use this anywhere you would use squash or pumpkin, but let's make Annalena's soup. Chop up a couple of small leeks and a small onion. Add a few chopped up carrots, and a fennel bulb or some celery ribs. Or both.

The standard wisdom says that you use butter when making a squash based soup. I prefer vegetable oil. Your call. Cover the bottom of a five quart soup pot with the oil, and then add the veggies. Bring it to medium heat, and cook away until they begin to soften. When they do, add a good teaspoon of salt. Stir that all together, and then add a quart of chicken stock. Finally, add that pumpkin. 3 cups of it please. Stir it all together, lower the heat, and go away for thirty minutes.

Turn off the heat, let it cool, and then, spin the whole thing in the blender again. This second pureeing seems to release a thickening agent from the pumpkin. It won't be apparent right away, but if you let it cool, you will have a thick product that will remind you of a thick cream soup.

This is rather bland. You will need to add the spices you like. You can go sweet, with things like cinammon, but how about being adventurous, with something like a hot pepper, diced up? Maybe some bacon or sausage if you are so inclined?

I suggest you NOT follow the standard procedure for this kind of thing, which would be to add dairy. The dairy will cut down the flavor of the pumpkin even further, and you really do not want that.

This is going to give you about a quart and a half of soup. More than enough to share. Share it. And add something new to your cooking repertoire.