Roasted pumpkin soup

Roasted Pumpkin Soup

Serves 7 as a starter

Ingredients:

650g butternut pumpkin (weighed without skin)

350g kent pumpkin (weighed without skin)

1 whole head of garlic

2 small onions

2 cups chicken style stock (or veg stock)

coconut cream and reserved pumpkin seeds for garnish

Method:

 Preheat oven to 220 degrees C.

Chop pumpkin into 2 inch chunks. Cut onions into quarters. Put into a bowl with the pumpkin and mix in a bit of sea salt and cracked pepper, and two teaspoons of any neutral cooking oil (I use rice bran). Spread in a single layer on a baking tray. Cut the top off the garlic and peel off the papery part of the skin. Wrap it up in tin foil and stick on the tray with pumpkin. Bake for about 40 minutes or until pumpkin and garlic are soft.

Once cooled a little, put into a food processor (if yours is gigantic you could do it all at once but I had to do mine in batches) with the stock and blend until smooth. Pour into a saucepan.

For the pumpkin seeds you could leave raw or wash all the pumpkin pulp off them and dry fry them in a pan until toasted and then chop into pieces.

Heat soup just before serving. If you want it thinner add more water or stock. Garnish with pumpkin seed pieces and a tablespoon of coconut cream :)

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 We had this as an entree last night at dinner. My garlic wasn't quite roasted enough so it was very garlicky. Perhaps put the garlic in the oven for 5-10 minutes before the pumpkin. Also my coconut cream was pretty much milk by the time I spooned it on. I'd suggest putting a can of coconut cream in the fridge overnight and using just the thick cream from the top of the can :)

The beauty of pumpkin soup is that it can be a started to pretty much anything and you can add any other seasonings you want (curry powder, italian herbs, etc). I find it quite filling so I try to make sure my main course (especially if dessert is a third course!) a fair bit smaller than usual so as my stomach doesn't explode.

I did have a dessert third course: Chocolate and vanilla ice cream sandwiches! Best idea ever by the way. I made the homemade vanilla ice cream from Veganomicon, and baked the Mocha Mama cookies from Vegan Cookies etc.

I bought the wrong kind of tofu for the ice cream but I just blended it a bit longer and it worked perfectly fine. I am so glad I only made enough ice cream sandwiches for everyone because I'd have eaten any leftovers all at once =D

One tip...make sure your cookies are pretty cold before putting the ice cream on them. Refrigerating would have been a good idea! As you can see it melted a bit. Still good though.

Fruit of the Month: Cherries!

Who doesn't love cherries?? (My sister, apparently. Crazy!) I have been eating cherries like they were air this season. I have been buying cherries for $7.99/kg at my fruit shop for a couple of weeks now - they are the reject cherries marked down because no one would buy them at the normal price (15 or so dollars/kg) but I think they are still good, especially used in what I've been using them in!

Cherries are apparently an aid to sufferes of gout (and arthritis) - the flavonoids in the cherry juice help reduce uric acid levels in the blood stream. Doesn't work for everyone, but it does for many! They also taste good. For only 87 calories per 1 cup serve, they make an excellent snack choice for anyone. (Not that I care about the caloric content - I'd eat the whole kilo if I wouldn't feel sick!) That same one cup serving also has 3% of your daily iron needs, 16% of your vitamin C and 2% of your calcium. [Source: nutritiondata.com]

Now for some uses:

Freeze them for the long cold winter ahead of us. I've found this to come in handy. I've hardly bought any frozen berries lately (because my freezer is full of containers of cherries) and pitting all the cherries is quite relaxing. I just cut them in half, twist it apart and then pry out the pit with a knife. Don't cut yourself. Apparently if you freeze them whole they'll take on an almond flavour from the pit. I just put it all into plastic takeaway containers (or whatever container you want) and freeze. When I need to use them it only takes a second to pry them apart (once you get one the whole lot usually falls apart).

Use them in a tart or pie. (Top right obviously). This was our Christmas dessert table! I contributed the Pear Frangipane Tart from the Post Punk Kitchen. Everyone loved it. I've made it twice now. I'm sure the pear version is lovely, but I don't think pears are in season here right now. But when they are I'm totally making it. Again.

Put them in your breakfast smoothie. I have smoothies for breakfast quite often. Since my old food processor finally carked it (JUST when I was about to start making my christmas tart) and I bought myself a fancy pants new one with a blender attachment, smoothies will be much more regular. Here's one I had this morning:

Cherry-Almond Smoothie

I small frozen banana

1 cup frozen cherries

30g (1/3 cup) almond meal

30g (1/3 cup) rolled oats

1 tbsp chia seeds

1 1/2 cups slmond milk

Blend. Makes about 2 cups.

This smoothie provides:  17g protein, 28% daily calcium, 10% daily iron, 23g fat (only 2 of which are saturated). Not bad huh? I was pretty impressed. It also lasted me for like, 3 hours.

Bake them into a cake or muffins. I made Lemon cherry muffins by Vegan in Bellingham. I chose this recipe while searching 'vegan cherry muffins' on the net because I already had all the ingredients. And they are so good. I made them yesterday afternoon and there's only 3 left. Good thing they are relatively good for you :)

And last, but not least, ice cream! I was gifted with an ice cream maker for Christmas from my mum and HOOFUCKINGRAY! I tested the wodnerful machine out today with a basic vanilla ice cream with what was supposed to be blasamic cherry swirl, but it turned out a little more like cherry ice cream. I used the lazy vanilla ice cream from A Vegan Ice Cream Paradise blog, except instead of creamer I used a can and abit of coconut cream. Unfortunately the shop only had light in the cheap brand, but full fat would definately have been better. This ice cream still rocks my world though!

I cooked 2 cups of pitted cherries down with 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar. This would be good on top of plain vanilla ice cream too, but I wanted something fancy for my first time use of the Wonder Machine! I'd chop the cherries up into little bits next time because I had to mash them this time and one squirted me in the eye. I thought I'd go blind. I didn't, obviously. So anyway, I let the ice cream maker do it's job for 20 minutes, and then I blobbed in this sauce (and 1/4 cup cacao nibs) and let it swirl around for a few minutes. Oooh it's good. The balsamic adds just a touch of a different flavour as an aftertaste. yum. I've had to stop myself from eating the whole lot. it's not even frozen yet!

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Happy cherry eating! I hope they stay cheap for just a little while longer...I want to freeze more for when I hibernate.