Pumpkin Soup with Curried Pumpkin Seeds

Its fall, its fall, there are pumpkins all around. Yellow and Orange, green ones too, what is one to do. Best to gather them up for soup ‘cause they’re rotting in the ground.

            -by Deb age 36 and a 1/2

I had to take a glucose test at the Drs. office on Monday. I’ve reached the crucial point in the pregnancy (7 months) where they test for gestational diabetes. Fun. I was given a cup and a 12 oz (or was it 16 oz) bottle of super sugary orange soda and told to knock it back all at once. I don’t mind orange soda, and I can tolerate super sweet things a little bit before my throat starts to close and I feel like gagging, but what I can’t tolerate is super cold fizzy things and that’s what this orange soda was all about. It was super cold, fizzy and cloyingly sweet and by the time I downed it I was ready to hurl. I had to sit in the office for an hour before they could take my blood, which would then be sent to the lab to test how well my body had processed all the sugar. While I waited, I made up stories in my head about a beautiful princess forced to wait in a Drs. office, doodled in my sketch book and thought about the soup I made on Saturday. Pumpkin...yummy. After a while I was getting a little bored and loopy, so I wrote the above lines, the beginning of a bad poem or maybe a song ( whatever it is it will forever remain unfinished), as a sort of homage to the pumpkin soup I was going to have for lunch once I was set free. I know its bad, but hey, I never said I was a writer!

I used a recipe from Leite's Culinaria. A terrific website, and one where I spend a lot of time just browsing around. I had been surfing around the web looking for recipes for curried pumpkin soup when I found this one. What appealed to me about this recipe was the spiced pumpkin seeds. We recently had dinner at a Tex-Mex place and while most of the dinner was just eh what really stood out were the roasted pumpkin seeds served with my rice. Toasted so that they had puffed just a bit and slightly salted they were the highlight of my dish, otherwise I'm sad to report, it was just the usual chicken enchilada drowned in too much cheese with beans and rice.

The soup itself turned out ok. It was just a bit more creamy than I had wanted, but I guess next time if I were to use this recipe, then not so much cream, maybe more chicken stock. I liked the squirt of lemon juice the recipe called for at the end, I assumed this was so that the soup would retain its color, but it did add a nice tanginess to the soup as well. I was surprised by the color. Pretty intense, no? It wasn't this intense before I added the cream, as a matter of fact, before I added the cream it looked the same color as the roasted butternut squash I used and more like the picture from the website. The cream turned it this crazy fluorescent orange...its kind of off putting actually, I better not stare at it too much, theres still a lot of soup left.

I am sad to say the pumkin seeds were not a hit. I thought they were WAY too spicy and tasted too much like turmeric. I'm not sure where it happened but I probably messed up the recipe at some point. I have this sneaky feeling that I was heavy handed when measuring the spices and this may be why the taste was so overpowering. I also cheated a bit and used raw pumkin seeds that were bought rather than the ones that came from the butternut squash. I should have made my own like the recipe called for, but I thought I could save time by using bought ones. It would have helped if I had gotten the right ones, the ones I bought had the shells still on and I'm pretty sure it would have been a more pleasant experience had they been shelled. With the shells on, it felt like I was chewing on spiced wood...(hey! spiced wood actually sounds kind of good, like some sort of potpouri scent) so after I took the picture, I picked out the pumpkin seeds with my spoon and flung them as hard as I could across the room, where they came to a fantastic explosion against the wall and slowly dribbled down to the floor. ACK! I did not, I just removed them and threw the whole lot away, better luck next time.

Written by Deb on October 28, 2003 01:06 AM