recipe: pumpkin soup

I was scrounging around in my fridge, and decided to make a meal of the remains in the veggie drawer. Unusually, there is no meat in this dish, but I feel that the savoriness of the mushrooms and the vegetables more than make up for it.

This soup is really quick to put together - there are only three ingredients:

• pumpkin (around 1/6 of a whole pumpkin)
•  leeks (two, outer stems removed)
• chinese mushrooms (rehydrated by soaking in water)

All the ingredients are cut up into 1/2 inch cubes. I kept aside a few mushrooms and 1/2 an inch of the leeks for garnishing.

I sauteed the pumpkin first in a few tablespoons of oil, to get a bit of browning on the edges.

Note: one of the most appealing parts of this recipe is that you can make the entire thing in the same pot - less washing up!

Then I added the mushrooms and leeks and continued to saute the veggies until they softened.

What you get afterwards is essentially baby food - not super appealing at this point. After this, I used an immersion blender to puree the ingredients into a smooth paste. I added some hot water to smoothen it to the  consistency I wanted.

For garnish, I sliced the leeks and mushrooms really thinly, and fried them in olive oil till they were crispy. The resulting soup was sweet, and light, since there wasn't any meat-based stock added to it.