Coconut Curry Pumpkin Soup - Using the Whole Pumpkin!

I love soup! Its great for a nice fall day when the leaves start to turn and all you feel like doing is curling up in blanket by a fireplace. Soup is perfect comfort food as well as being a great way to use whatever you got sitting around in the fridge. Since its fall I figured I would post one of my favorite recipes for pumpkin coconut soup. Now I set a recipe that you can follow along with, but if you don't have one of the components I wouldn't worry about it. If you have other ingredients that you think would be good add them too! All you really need is some coconut cream or milk and a pumpkin, the rest is just icing on the cake. also, I hate throwing things away so I wanted to focus on using the parts of the pumpkin you normally discard. Why waste it when you can make delicious food with it! So I added how to process the seeds and skin of the pumpkin as well as the scraps of the other veg. Okie dokie, lets get started.

Food stuffs

1 small pumpkin

4 medium onions

3 cloves of garlic

1 medium carrot

1 hot pepper

1 table spoon of fresh ginger

2 cans of coconut cream

salt and pepper to taste

tablespoon of green curry paste

Hardware

2 big sauce pots

peeler

metal spoon

knife

immersion blender

various containers

just start by roughly chopping all of your vegetables. Roughly dice the onions, and carrots. Mince the ginger, hot pepper, and garlic. I used fresh young ginger from my urban balcony garden because I wanted to give the reader the impression that my life is better than theirs. Let me know in the comments if it worked as I am very insecure. Throw it all in the stock pot off the heat as you cut. Don't forget to take all of your skins, peels and scraps and put them in separate containers, not in the garbage. I keep an old yogurt container full of scraps in my freezer and whenever I cut veg I add them to the container. When I get around to making a stock for something else ill just throw all these scraps in the stock. if you don't like that idea you could compost them or feed them to animals.

start by cutting the top and bottom off the pumpkin. The stem of the pumpkin is the only thing in this recipe I throw away, keep the rest for stock. Then cut the pumpkin in half. Then peel the pumpkin. It may seem weird to cut and then peel but I like to cut it first so I can maneuver the pumpkin better by resting it on various flat surfaces. Now use a spoon to carve out the seeds in the center. Lastly roughly dice the pumpkin and toss it in with the rest of your vegetables in the pot. By now you should have a stock pot full of vegetables, a container full of unwashed pumpkin seeds, and a container full of pumpkin peels.

Take your pumpkin seeds and put em in a bowl in the sink. Run cold water over the seeds and agitate them to separate them from the fleshy bits. Throw your fleshy bits in the veg scrap container. When you feel like your seeds are nice and clean enough strain the water off and put the seeds on a towel to dry. You can wring out the seeds or put them on a tray in the fridge to dry. You will want them to be a dry as possible because you are gonna deep fry them later. The drier the safer and crispier your frying will be.

take your skins and arrange them in a way that makes them easier to chop. I take 5 or 6 strips and arrange them so they are stacked on top of each other like in the pictures. then just slice em into long strips. your gonna fry them and they will end up looking like hickory sticks, so shoot for that shape.

eI put two steps into one here really. First I would put your pot with all your chopped veg on the stove and add 2 cans of coconut cream and a cans worth of warm water. Put it on high until it comes to a rolling boil then turn it down to a simmer and leave it for around a half an hour. you just want it to cook until all the veg are tender enough to blend smooth when you use the immersion blender later, but the longer the better. while your waiting for that to cook put on your other stock pot and add a liter or so of neutral oil, then set it on high. I used canola oil but you can use peanut or any other neutral oil.THIS STEP CAN BE DANGEROUS! don't walk away from the stove while the oil is on high. If you have to leave the stove take the oil off the heat. Realistically a home deep fryer would be best here but I don't have one and I use this method all the time, but i'm always careful.

So If your not familiar with deep frying ill give you a low down. You want to keep your oil below 400 degrees fahrenheit. above that and you will burn things before you cook them, or mabey even burn the oil itself. if your oil is smoking its either too hot or overused and its time to replace it. Your normally gonna fry stuff at 350 degrees, use a thermometer. Water is a big no no, if you add too much moisture to the oil it will start to go wild and spray boiling hot oil all over everything. So dry your deep fryables as much as you can before introducing them to the pot. If your going to cover the pot to control splatter make sure you leave it kind of open and not totally covered so steam can escape. When you add your deep fryables the temperature of the oil will drop by about 15-25 degrees. I would shoot for oil at a temp of 375 and expect it to drop to 350 when I add in about 2 cups worth of food stuffs. In the case of this recipe you basically want to deep fry things until they are what the great Guy Fierri calls GBD (golden brown and delicious). for the seeds that should take like 5 minutes and for the skins it should take like 60 seconds. So set your deep frying pot up like that, If this freaks you out you can toss the raw skins and seeds with oil and salt and roast them at 350 until they are GBD.

When your oil is at 375 drop all your dried off seeds into the hot oil. Again you just want to brown them, when they are brown they are done. Use a strainer or a slotted spoon to scoop all the seeds out when they are done. Line a bowl with a rag to soak up the excess oil. Put em in the bowl and toss them with salt. transfer the seeds from the bowl onto a tray to cool and repeat the steps above with the skins. When your done turn off the oil let it cool and strain it through a coffee filter into a jar to use again another time.

Once your veg is cooked until tender blend it with your immersion blender. you want it to be silky smooth. then add all your seasoning and blend again. I seasoned it with salt and green curry paste. You could easily add black pepper with the salt or a nice curry powder instead of the paste. Season everything you eat to your liking if the recipe calls for something you don't like don't add it and add something you do. The way to be a better cook is to deviate from the recipe and put your own spin on it. id say I added about a teaspoon and a half of kosher salt, and a tablespoon of green curry paste. Although I always suggest adding salt and any other seasoning slowly and tasting then adding more if you want more.

Now that you got your soup and your garnish take your nicest bowl and plate up the soup so it looks pretty. The most important part of cooking is taking a nice photo for social media. Food is not worth eating without it. All jokes aside you eat with your eyes first and this soup is so pretty with all the skin and stuff. I really love this soup and it works great with carrot or squash instead of pumpkin. coconut curry is so good with root veg. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! Now go make something!