Spicy Pumpkin Soup

I ate a lot of soup in Shanghai earlier this year. In fact, I may have eaten some form of soup every day I was there. One of the most common soups I encountered, especially on Western multi-course lunch menus, was a pumpkin soup. Creamy, smooth & warming (albeit somewhat bland and most likely not vegan).


Seeing as I have never made a pumpkin soup, I decided to try it out. My recipe of choice is from my Vegan Fire & Spice cookbook, and it is located in the chapter on Thailand. The recipe was definitely different from what I sampled in China, it is rich with coconut milk, lemongrass, peanut butter and limes, and spiked with dried peppers (which sounds like an unlikely combination but actually mingles together nicely).

The concept is to simmer the vegetables in the vegetable stock and then strain out the solids before adding the pumpkin puree, coconut milk & peanut butter.

Here is the stock simmering:


I think it came out pretty good, here's how the finished product looks:

On the note of exercising, I did manage to run a couple of miles prior to embarking on my pumpkin soup mission, so gold star for that.