Pumpkin Soup, Tomato Soup, Smoked Beef Sandwich

This post covers two of my meals. This evening’s and last’s.

Both, were designed after deciding on the soup we’d have.

As we managed to purchase some very cheap pumpkin – 3 large ones for about S$3, and we had slowly consumed all of them, we decided the last was going to be made into – no prizes for guessing – pumpkin soup. This was to be the soup on Sunday evening.

Usually, I make my own vegetable broth, but this time I decided to go with no-MSG stock cubes. They may have no added MSG in them, but there are a few incomprehensible words on the ingredients list that sound they may be just as bad as MSG.

Yes, I did check, because to me “no added MSG” is not the same as “no MSG”.

Pumpkin soup

Part 1

• Heat oven to 180 deg C or so.
• 1 large pumpkin, de-seeded, skinned, cut into even sized chunks.
• 3 tomatoes, halved. (and skinned, if you’re fussy)
• 3 cloves garlic, unskinned.
• Black pepper.
• Mix all this with olive oil in the pan.
• Put it in the oven, cook till soft, caramelised, stirring halfway through.
• Try and hide garlic under pumpkin so it doesn’t overcook, or remove halfway.
• Takes 30 minutes and more depending on the amount of pumpkin.
• Top with cream when serving. (optional)

Part 2

• 1 large onion, sliced
• Heat up oil in a pot sufficient for the total amount of soup.
• +/- ground nutmeg. (sweetens)
• +/- ground cayenne pepper. (optional, more spicy)
• +/- ground ginger. (optional, more spicy, more warmth)
• 1 litre chicken stock or so. Add more if you want it less thick.
• +/- salt & pepper.
• Fry the onion and the spices in the hot oil. Watch the heat.
• When the onion is soft, add in the pumpkin and stock. Scrape all the burnt sticky bits from the pumpkin pan, squeeze out the garlic from the skins and add it all in.
• Bring to boil. Do a taste. Look at the amount of pumpkin to the stock. Add more stock or water to make it less thick if you want.
• Taste, taste, taste. After adding spices, allow the flavours to develop before tasting again.
• Blend it in small amounts, unless you want a fountain of hot soup all over the place.

The day before, I found 4 pieces of lamp chops on reduced price and got them. And you know, going by the size of lamb chops in Singapore, 4 pieces, isn’t going to feed four.

Lamb

• lamb
• +/- garlic cloves.
• +/- sea or kosher salt.
• +/- black pepper.
• +/- rosemary.
• +/- olive oil.
• Pound garlic and salt together into a paste. Add black pepper and pound. Add rosemary and pound to a paste.
• Add olive oil and mix to the paste.
• Put all over the lamb.
• Grill on barbecue or, in my case, it was on a separate tray when the pumpkin had cooked more than halfway.
• How long? I don’t know. I just kinda poke the meat and it came out nice and pink.

So I had the lamb, and it wasn’t enough. So I got some chicken thigh.

Chicken & Potato

• In the morning, score chicken parts. Marinade with salt and pepper. Put it in fridge.
• In the evening, heat oven to 190 deg C. Take out the chicken from fridge.
• Skin and cut potato into even sized cubes.
• Boil potato with half a lemon and salt.
• When soft, drain potato, saving the water for a soup or stock base.
• Take out lemon and put it aside with chicken.
• Cover the pot again, let the potato dry in the heat inside.
• When dry, toss the potato inside the pot. This mashes the outside of the cube of potato just a little.
• Pat dry the chicken.
• Put the chicken in a pan, with some olive oil.
• Put in some sprigs of rosemary.
• Take the hot lemon and put it under the chicken.
• Pop it into oven.
• Take half cooked chicken out. There should be oil from the skin on the pan. Put in the potato. If potatoes don’t look well oiled, add in a bit more olive oil. Rip more rosemary from the pot and crush it, mix with potatoes and pop all into oven.
• Brown the potatoes, the fluffy part of the potato which you created when bashing it in the pot, should become a crisp. (Mine didn’t. I blame the lousy quality of melamine-filled China grown potatoes.)
• When the potatoes are halfway to being as brown as you like, take it out of the oven and put in the half-cooked chicken with the potatoes.
• Grill till cooked.

I am so happy to have two ovens. The Baby Belling handled the chicken, the La Germania handled the pumpkin and lamb.

Sorry, I don’t have any pictures because I forgot to take a shot of them before eating. Good thing tonight, I didn’t forget.

Tomato soup

• Oven: 180 deg C
• Skin tomatoes. (if you’re lazy like me, you can skip this step)
• Halve tomatoes.
• Unskinned garlic cloves.
• +/- pepper and kosher salt.
• In a baking pan, mix all with olive oil.
• Put in oven till caramelized. At least half hour.
• In the meantime, slice onion, one medium carrot, one stick celery, in small regular sizes.
• Heat up olive oil in a pot large enough for the entire amount of soup.
• Fry onions till soft.
• Add carrots. Fry till soft.
• Add celery. Fry till soft.
• When the tomatoes are ready, add them into the pot.
• +/- Chicken stock. Again, depends on the quantity and how thick/thin you want the soup to be. Also depends on the amount of tomatoes you’re using, and quality of tomatoes. Some tomatoes have more seed and therefore will be more liquid.
• Don’t forget to take some of the stock from the pot, put it in the pan you used to grill the tomatoes and scrape all the sticky burnt goodness from the pan and put it into the soup.
• +/- Worcestershire sauce.
• +/- salt and pepper.
• Taste, taste, taste.
• Blend cautiously.

As I was waiting for the tomatoes to be done, I got bored and added red pepper, thinly sliced and grilled it together with the tomatoes. I had some slices of bacon too. I placed these on top of the tomatoes and also grilled it. I would slice the bacon to thin slices and sprinkle it on top of the tomato soup when serving. I also threw in some fresh rosemary from the pot to add a more beefy flavour to the soup.

Okay, at this point, you will find the skin separating from the tomatoes. You can fish them out, most of it, or just leave it in. I find the blender gets it anyway. And I like my soups to have a few rough chunks and bits anyway. I fished out some since my dogs were looking hungrily at me. At this stage, it really is good enough to eat, if you want a nice chunky soup. You could also blend only half.

The smoked beef sandwich I made because I saw some smoked beef on offer. I decided to make this into a sandwich, using rye bread. But someone took the rye bread and so I had to got sliced walnut bread from carrefour. It was sliced too thin and it was hard to not smash the slices while slicing it. Put in some spicy mustard as well.

My lousy handphone rendered both soups the same colour. But here they are side by side, possible only because there was another 5 servings of leftover pumpkin soup.

For two rainy days, the soup was very nice. The one at the top is Tomato soup with cream, for those who like it extra creamy.

And here are the three dogs who had some tomato and pumpkin soup too, keeping me on the edge of my seat while I was typing this post.