Friday 28 November 2014

TONSIL-TAMING SOUPERSTAR

Recipe: Pumpkin Soup
Time Taken: 1 hour
Ingredients: Oil, 2 onions, 1 kilogram of pumpkin or squash, 700ml of vegetable stock, a 142ml pot of double cream, bread for serving.

Hello lovely readers,

Remember how I was really down and miserable yesterday? It turns out it was my tonsils that were the cause of it all! They’re really unwell – I have tonsillitis for the first time ever.

Tonsils are like these strange things at the back of your throat. Look, you can see Miley’s here…

So this morning was awful. My throat was epically sore. I couldn’t get through to the doctors for ages. Finally did and they had no appointments. Cried on the phone. Walked to the pharmacy but they just gave me painkillers and Tyrozets. My flatmate shone a torch in my mouth and my tonsils had white spots. Got the Metro to the hospital. Had to spell my surname (don’t ask) multiple times, which hurt my throat. Cried again. Saw a nurse who advised hot drinks and refused all pleas for antibiotics. Not when I’m “young and fit”. Back home.
And then I pulled my shit together! Literally, I’m not going behind on my work schedule for this. No way. So this afternoon’s been better. Constant hot drinks have done my throat some good. I’m still QUITE ILL and bloody contagious (fun), but powering on.

And managing to eat! I microwaved some Weetabix into pulp for breakfast and stirred in a killer amount of sugar. It hit lunchtime and I thought: I’m ill so… soup? And, you know what, I had homemade soup in the freezer. I’m not joking. Homemade soup.  A cure!
Basically, at Halloween I bought A LOT of pumpkin intending to try loads of pumpkin recipes out. But then I didn’t. And I had all this pumpkin and wanted something easy to use it up in just to get rid of it all without being wasteful. I made soup and it tasted MIGHTY.

Here’s how to whip up your own pumpkin soup in ten easy steps:

1. Cut your pumpkin in half. Hollow out all the seeds and goo from its centre. Throw that away. Cut the pumpkin’s flesh into chunks, slicing off the orange skin. Throw the skin away. Weight out 1kg of pumpkin cubes and keep these for soup-making. If you have extra, save them for another recipe??

2. Cut the tops off your two onions, peel away their skin and then finely chop them.

3. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a big saucepan. Gently cook your onion for 5 minutes until it’s soft but not coloured.

ChefBeHere Top Tip: When choosing a pan, look at how much pumpkin you have. This all has to fit in the pan. You need a BIG PAN.

4. Add your pumpkin to the pan and carry on cooking for ten minutes, stirring/prodding/shaking up until your pumpkin starts to soften and turn golden.

5. Make up 700ml of vegetable stock. You might need multiple stock cubes or stock pots in order to make this much stock. The packet of whichever you have should advise you of how many cubes/pots you will need if you’re mixing them with 700ml of boiling water.

6. Pour your vegetable stock into the pan and season everything with salt and pepper. Bring the contents of the pan to the boil. Then simmer it for 10 minutes until your pumpkin is very soft.

7. Pour your pot of double cream into the pan and stir this into the soup mix.

8. Now, either use a hand blender to puree the soup, or (if you don’t have one of these like me) put your soup mix into a proper blender and whizz it up! It took me several runs to do this as the blender we have is quite small, so afterwards I collected it all back into one pan and stirred the soup together again over a low heat for a few minutes.

9. Divide your soup into three. I poured one portion into a warmed bowl for me to eat immediately, and then poured the other two portions into plastic tupperwares that I froze to eat another time. Leave these to cool for a little while before placing them in the freezer. Try to eat them within the next two months or they might not taste so good after that much time.

10. Serve your pumpkin soup with warm, crusty bread!

Like this…

What do you think to pumpkin soup? I think it’s really tasty! As a veggie, I used to like chicken soup and so I think because this is very creamy and savoury, and a similar colour to chicken soup, that it reminds me of that. But it tastes different!
I don’t really KNOW exactly what pumpkin tastes like. To be honest. But I like the taste of this soup. I do and it’s low-calorie and counts towards your 5-a-day and it’s a top warmer on a winter day. So I rate pumpkin soup! In my opinion, it’s worth a shot.
And the feeling of tucking into soup that YOU MADE YOURSELF is the bomb. You’re like, somebody, pat me on the back. Right now.

So, c’mon readers, soup it up! I challenge you. I know pumpkins are hard to find after Halloween, but you can use squash instead and they’re always around. Don’t like pumpkin or squash? Make any frigging soup you like, just give it a go. For me.

Soup safely my souperstars,
Hayley


No comments:

Post a Comment