Roast Pumpkin and White Bean Vegetable soup

This is the delicious pumpkin I bought the other day! I've never seen a pumpkin so orange. It smelled really good too. I'm going to be so sick of pumpkin by the end of it. Haha so worth it.

Roast Pumpkin and White Bean Vegetable Soup
4 small serves
Ingredients:

¼ medium sized organic pumpkin
1 med-large onion
1 small head garlic
1-2 tbsp rice bran oil
½ tsp dried oregano
½ cup uncooked navy beans (soaked overnight in cold water, or quick boiled and soaked for 1 hour)
½ red capsicum
½ small head brocolli
½ small head cauliflower
2 yellow squash
500ml ‘chicken’ stock (or vegetable broth, or water)
½ tsp chilli powder
½ tsp ground sage
freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Cook beans. Leave in the water until they are required.

Cut pumpkin into equal sized chunks. Leave the skin on if you want, I did. Put the chunks into a bowl with the oil and oregano. Toss until well coated. Arrange chunks on a baking tray. Put whole garlic (I took some skin off and trimmed the top) and whole peeled and trimmed onion in leftover oil in bowl and coat. Wrap them in tin foil and put on the tray with pumpkin. Roast at 180 degrees C (350 F) for one hour.

Once cooked, let cool for a little while and then put it all in a food processor (minus the skins). Blend until smooth and transfer it to a large saucepan.

Chop the capsicum, brocolli, cauliflower and squash into small chunks. Blend until mostly smooth and add to pumpkin mix in saucepan.

Make 500ml chicken stock out of the bean’s cooking water (no waste!) and put the beans in with the pumpkin. Add spices and turn element to medium heat. Add enough stock to get the consistency you want. I used pretty much all 500ml and it was pasta-sauce thick.

Serve with garlic bread!

This soup was quite sweet but so yummy. I'm thinking next time I make it I may roast all the vegetables. The extra veg was sort of an after thought when I looked in the fridge and saw it was about to go bad. I managed to get the seasoning perfect first time and you can pretty much taste each individual vegetable without it being too much. Tomorrow lunch we are going to have leftovers as a pasta sauce. Very excited :)