Pumpkin Soup

This blog isn't actually supposed to be all about France and eventually, well until we live there anyway, I will run out of things to write specifically about France. That and I promise there are other aspects of our lives. Like food. Last week I mentioned two different meals we had on Facebook and got asked for the recipes. I thought I'd go ahead and share them here.

In honor of the cooler weather gracing Houston and the holiday spirit, Jeremy and I made pumpkin soup. (By the way, I had amazing pumpkin soup in France when we went out to celebrate our friend Steve's birthday, it was ah-mazing with chunks of roasted chestnuts in it and other magical properties I couldn't imagine.) For well over a year now I've been in love with the recipes from this blog. We have made a wide variety of her recipes and have been inspired to create some of our own as well with mostly great success. Hint- it is really hard to screw up crock-pot cooking, not impossible but really hard. Anyway, we took inspiration from Stephanie's Jamiacan Pumpkin Soup for our festive meal. I didn't use fresh pumpkin, just plain pumpkin from a can and I tripled the amount of pumpkin called for (I wanted it to be really pumpkiny), added about 2 cups of water and two potatoes. I can't ever follow a recipe exactly, particularly if I've made it before. Oh yeah, I went ahead and added cinnamon too but I couldn't tell you how much, I just shook some in. Everything went into the crock-pot (I used my big 6 quart) and cooked on low all day, 7 hours give or take. I ran into a hitch when I couldn't find the bottom of my blender when it came time to puree it so I improvised and used the hand mixer. This was woefully inadequate and led to me wishing (loudly) that Santa would bring me a submersible hand blender. I said this a lot, hopefully he got the memo. So our smooth, creamy pumpkin soup was more like chunky pumpkin stew but that didn't stop us. For the girls I drizzled some honey and a touch of cream on top of their soup and then, because I knew the chunks would not be appreciated, I added a squirt of whipped cream on top of that garnished with chopped walnuts. They claimed they loved it. Personally, I skipped the cream and just had a touch of honey and nuts on top of mine. I loved it. The chunks weren't too bad though I think I would have liked it better smooth but it was warming, filling and very tasty. I like the combination of sweet and savory in this soup, it works very well and of course you can skip the sweet if you don't like the idea by just not adding honey on top. If I were serving this for a dinner party, I would have bought a large pumpkin, scooped out the inside and served the soup in that. I would have also run out and invested in a submersible hand blender.