Easy-Peasy Winter Soup feat. Butternut Pumpkin, Sweet Potato & Carrot
Monday, June 15, 2015
Winter is finally here! And while it's still all bright blue skies and sunshine where we are, the temperature has started to drop and there's nothing more satisfying than hot homemade soup on a cold winter's night.
My favourite thing about making your own soup is it's pretty much fail proof. Take this recipe for example, I googled a few standard pumpkin soup recipes to look for tasty flavour pairings, threw it together in about an hour
Ingredients
1 x butternut pumpkin (or half a giant one)
1 x sweet potato
2 x large carrots
1x brown onion
1 x large garlic clove (or more if you fancy)
1 x bunch of sage leaves (leave them whole)
1 x large fresh ginger chunk, about a thumb size piece
1L of liquid salt reduced chicken stock (you can switch out for vegetable if you prefer)
Extra Virgin Olive oil (or whatever oil you prefer to use)
Salt n Pepper
Stick blender OR large heatproof blender
Method
Most of the work in this recipe is the prep and waiting for the veggies to roast, the actual "cooking" is about 10mins worth. Like with most vegetable soups this has a straight forward method - all you need to do is cook the veggies, add liquid (stock or cream or whatever) and then blitz to a smooth consistency.
Step 1) Prep the veggies. Slice into halves and chuck into an ovenproof dish that will fit everything. Slosh a decent amount of olive oil over the veggies in the dish, then season with salt and pepper. Shove in a preheated oven at about 180 degrees or whatever temperature you would normally roast your potatoes at in your oven.
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| 1/2 a giant butternut pumpkin, brown onion, carrots and sweet potato |
Step 2) Now while the veggies are roasting have a glass of wine chop up the garlic into smallish chunks - don't worry about being too finicky as they're going to get blitzed with everything else anyways. Then peel and grate the fresh ginger on the finer setting of your grater or use a microplane. Set both aside for later.
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| fresh sage, garlic, ginger and chicken stock |
Step 3) Once the pumpkin, sweet potato, carrot and onion are roasted (it should take about an hour-ish, you can test with a knife to make sure they're soft all the way through) take them out of the oven.
Grab a large saucepan, slosh in a good amount of oil, wait 'til its hot then add the garlic and sage leaves.
Once the garlic and sage are sautéed/toasted, take the saucepan off the heat (trust me lol, its easier) then add in the veggies - you can scoop the pumpkin straight out of its shell and the onions will slide right out of their skins. The sweet potato and carrots are fine as is. Smoosh with a wooden spoon/spatula.
Step 4) Return the saucepan to the heat and add about half the chicken stock. Now comes the moderately terrifying/fun part - blitzing! For this select your weapon of choice depending on what you have in your kitchen:
If you have a stick blender => blend the veggies and stock in the pot on a medium speed - be careful of flying bits as they'll be stupid hot. Slowly add more stock until the soup is at a consistency you want.
If you have a heatproof drink blender => instead of adding the veggies to the pan, simply cook the garlic and sage and then add these plus the veggies and the stock to a large heatproof blender and blitz. Continue to add stock until the soup is at the consistency you want.
Step 5) Then to lift the whole flavour and give it a fresh zingy edge, throw in the grated fresh ginger and stir through. You can add this just before blitzing if you prefer.
Lastly garnish and serve! Here I've added a dollop of greek yoghurt for a little luxury and some snow pea sprouts for greenery.
My other half and I found this soup was creamy enough in it's own right but if you want make it extra decadent feel free to stir in some cream after you've blitz it. It stores fantastically in the freezer for future chilly nights :)
And that's it, my easy-peasy winter soup with pumpkin, sweet potato and carrot.
Bambi xox
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