Non-primordial soup

[hrj]

Here are a couple of soups I experimented with recently.

Pumpkin-in-a-pumpkin soup I had this idea for making pumpkin soup served in a mini-pumpkin. The concept was to microwave the gutted pumpkin just sufficiently to be able to scoop out the flesh while still leaving enough solid structure for the "bowl". Didn't quite work. But here's the result:

Remove the top off a soft-ball sized cooking pumpkin, then remove the seeds. Replace the top and microwave on high for ca. 5 minutes. Attempt to scrape out the pulp without damaging the integrity of the rind. Fail. Give up and just scrape out the pulp.

Chop half an onion and put it, the pumpkin pulp, and 2 c. chicken broth into a saucepan and simmer until thoroughly mushy. Add a sufficiency of pumpkin pie spice. If you plan to serve the soup cold, add more spice. Puree the soup in a blender, then add a small handful of raisins and 1/2 c. half-and-half. Bring just barely to a simmer. Make sure the raisins are properly distributed into the various servings.

Results: I rather liked it -- subtle but hearty, and with the right sweet/savory balance. It occurred to me afterwards that the nuked mini-pumpkin would have worked well as a bowl if I hadn't tried to remove the pulp, so if you wanted to have a very pumpkiny meal, you could serve the soup in a cooked shell and then eat the middle out of the shell afterwards. But that's a lot of pumpkin.

Fake Chinese sweet-bean soup I wanted to try to reconstruct the dessert soup that scotica and I had at the restaurant last Sunday, so I went on-line and looked up a bunch of recipes with the keywords "chinese sweet bean soup". The concensus was that it was sweetened cooked azuki (red) beans, cooked in water, with a touch of orange or tangerine peel for flavor, and lotus seeds for a color and texture contrast.

For experimentation purposes, I picked up both some pre-cooked canned sweetened red bean paste and some dry red beans. Also some chinese preserved tangerine peel. The problem is that I was completely unable to find lotus seeds. I wasn't looking in a specifically Chinese market, but Berkeley Bowl has a very decent Asian foods section (the sort where they had to slap on stick-on labels with the English name and ingredient information because the original package didn't consider that necessary). So since I'd originally mistaken the lotus seeds for chestnuts, I figured I'd fake it with that.

Simmer 1 cup water with ca. 1/4 tsp dried tangerine peel (minced finely). Add one cooked chestnut, sliced. Pour the water slowly into 2 Tbsp of prepared sweet red bean paste (in your soup bowl), stirring as you go to avoid lumps.

Results: For the taste, it seemed to be about the right level of wateriness, but the bean pulp settled out of the soup quickly, so I had to keep stirring as I drank -- somethign I don't recall from the restaurant soup. The chestnuts were pretty much indistinguishable from my memory of the restaurant soup, so it worked as a substitute. I'll try double the beans to water next time, although that starts putting the calorie count into serious dessert land, rather than being simply "amusingly sweet".

On the house project front, I fit in the linen-closet re-org last night and have added the twin sheets to the bag intended for Goodwill. And I've had seven responses to the Craigs List ad, so tonight I think it's time to move on to the next stage of screening. (Including internet background checks.)

Comments

[duchessletitia.livejournal.com]

I have my fingers crossed that you find a good one. :-)

[wulfsdottir.livejournal.com]

I've had good luck scooping out pulp but leaving squash bowls intact by using a grapefruit spoon. The sharp edges mean less pressure is needed, but the small blade makes it less likely that you'll punch through the bottom while scraping out the side. The soup sounds tasty - I might have to try it. :)