Pumpkin Soup - perfect for a cold Thanksgiving

It's potluck time for work and I signed up to do one of my favorite dishes to make, Green Bean Casserole, but another coworker signed up for it too. Well, no point in having the same dish twice, so I thought really hard about what else I could make. PUMPKIN SOUP!!! It's gonna be a cold day (relatively speaking, here in Los Angeles) and that seems like a very comforting type of food...so, I was excited thinking about it all day.  Thinking about spending time in my kitchen cooking this up and then I got this notion in my head - I don't want to make from a can of puréed pumpkins...I want the real deal!

So, after work, I went to Fresh and Easy down the street from my work and saw they sold some Sugar Pie Pumpkin, perfect for my soup! They are much smaller than the average jack-o-lantern pumpkins, but I may have gone overboard when I got 5! Yes, portion control has always been my problem...I always cook for the size of an army and it's usually actually for a handful...oh, well! I love to cook!

Anyway, here's the full list of Ingredients I used (forgive me, these are guesstimates - I am bad at keeping track of ingredients, but I'm trying):

5 Sugar Pie Pumpkins

18 cups chicken broth

1 tablespoon of olive oil (I ran out)

8 tablespoons of butter (would have only used 6, but I ran out of olive oil)

2 bay leaves

1 large onion, finely chopped

1/2 a celery (about 6-8 ribs), finely chopped

6 tablespoons of flour

5 teaspoons of ground thyme

Hot sauce, to taste

4 cups heavy cream

3 teaspoons of ground nutmeg 

Making Pumpkin Purée:

Bring a big stock pot little more than halfway filled with water to a boil. A little salt goes a long way.

Wash the outside of the pumpkin thoroughly with warm water, NO soap!

Slice in half and take out the seeds and stringy middle crap! (You can save the seeds to grow or roast - I threw them out, ain't nobody got time for that! Well, I don't this week. I tried saving spaghetti squash seeds last week and they got moldy on me because I got busy and forgot about them. Anyway, I digress...) place in stock pot of hot water. Repeat until all pumpkins are done. Each time, I try to push the newest pumpkin to the bottom with my wooden spoon. Add more water of needed.

I let boil for about 25-30 minutes and I turned off and draine the water and let cool. I'm impatient, so I threw some ice in there and added more water. That turned into hot water pretty quickly, so I pulled them out and let then sit.

Scoop out the inside into a blender. It came out pretty easy, but the skin would fall apart too and rip into pieces. I added some of the chicken broth to help purée it and let it rip.  Took me about 3 batches and maybe yielded about 12-15 cups? I'm so sorry I can't remember, but it was around there!

Time to make the soup:

I heated my stock pot over medium heat and added oil and butter to melt. 

Add bay leaves, celery, and onions. Season with salt and pepper. Cook until soft, about 8-10 minutes. Add flour and thyme, stir up and cook flour for about a minute or so.

Start stirring in the chicken broth and bring to a boil.

Stir in the pumpkin and mix into soup. Simmer for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure nothing is burning at the bottom. (I have partial videos of this on Instagram, but I forgot to take pictures because I got so into cooking - boyfriend had to take the video)

Add in the cream, nutmeg and hot sauce to taste. Reduce heat to low and and keep warm until you serve, or in my case. I cooked for another 10 minutes and transferred into my crockpot to take to work.

Soups are rarely photogenic, huh? I'll try to take a better picture and post later!

Better, but not really pictures...