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Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Cheap, Easy, Quick, Healthy Pumpkin Soup

Note: I did not say "delicious." I'm not sure about the flavor.

This soup, from Ronald Johnson's Simple Fare, is based on an Elizabeth David recipe. The ingredients are: onion, canned pumpkin, cabbage, white beans. I've been meaning to make this for years, but the planets did not align till today. I had all the ingredients, plus we were still recuperating from an overnight trip to Alabama to see our dear daughter.

Here's how to do it: saute an onion in butter (or lard!), add some garlic, shredded cabbage, and water (or stock). Add the pumpkin too. You're supposed to cook dried beans with this, but I had some already cooked, with only about a day left of their lifespan.

This took a ton of salt. And I added some butter in at the end to try to coax out more flavor. We had it with salad (also near the end of its lifespan) and good bread.

I'm not sure if I love this, or even like it, but I'm sure the combination of superfoods has added at least a little to my lifespan.

While I'm not sure if I like the soup apart from its intrinsic virtues, I LOVE the cookbook, which is too little known, I'm sure. I will have more to say about the book apace.

4 comments:

Darla said...

We do a similar soup but use hominy instead of beans and jazz it up with a little cumin and red pepper flakes. Nothing really has to "cook" if you used canned pumpkin/hominy and finely shred the cabbage, just heat and the cabbage stays crunchy.

We like it.

Darla

PS - I've been following along here for a bit.

Duchesse said...

My mother used to say, "Anyone can be a good cook if they use enough butter and cream". I had a similar thought reading this: butter and stock will make a half decent soup out of about anything. Judicious seasoning helps too.

Someone once served me a pumpkin stew in its tureen, the hollowed-out pumpkin. Very charming. Not a fabulous soup but the presentation was a knockout.

Funny about Money said...

Interesting combination. I've never been nuts about pumpkin soup, but the addition of the beans and cabbage...hmmmm....

A friend of mine made, off the top of his head, an interesting pumpkin sauce that he served with lamb. He added (yes!) truffles and also made it slightly spicy with a small amount of fresh hot pepper. Don't recall if it had garlic but probably did. It was pretty good.

Frugal Scholar said...

@Seeyou/Darla--This sounds better than mine. I've never used hominy. Pepper flakes improve almost anything!

Thanks for stopping by and commenting!

@Duchesse--I once had a nightmare soup served in a pumpkin shell. The cook didn't clean out the inside, so strings and seeds were in every bite.

@Funny--If I ever have a truffle, it is going in a pasta dish! How lucky that you got to eat that dish.