Roasted Pumpkin Soup

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180°C

2. Cut pumpkin into 1cm or so wedges you don’t want them too thin or they will burn. Coat in about ½ tsp of olive oil, 1tsp of Italian herbs and the paprika and add to a roasting tray with baking paper

3. Roast Pumpkin for approx. 40 minutes or just until they are nice and brown. If they are browning too quickly just cover with foil, we want them golden and roasted not burnt

4. Chop your onion and mince your garlic and add to a pan with a little olive oil on a medium heat to start cooking, no too high as you don’t want it to burn. If you have a saucepan that will fit the stock etc too you can use this to fry off the onions etc if not do this in a separate pan

5. While that is cooking we want to make a soffritto dice your celery and carrot up nice and small and add into the pan with the ¼ tsp of Italian herbs and cook for 10 minutes in a low-medium heat. Again we want it to cook and get a little colour but not burn. Stir throughout the 10 minutes

6. Once this is cooked if you have cooked this in a separate frypan add a little stock to the fry pan to get all the goodness off the pan and from our soffritto mix

7. Add your vegetable stock, soffritto mix and pumpkin into a large pot and blitz with your stick mixer. If you don’t have one you can do this in a blender as well just be carful if your ingredients are super hot as some blenders don’t love that. Blend it really well until it is super smooth, I actually blended mine, heated it and blended again to make it a bit smoother

8. Once blended turn your stove top to a medium heat and heat your soup up so its all warmed through stirring continuously so it doesn’t burn or stick

9. Serve right away with some sour cream or yogurt etc. You can even cook up some bacon or pancetta and put some crispy bits on top