La petite biscotte

It’s autumn which means it’s pumpkin season! Normally every market should be filled with a great variety of pumpkin/squash/acorn. Yeah well that’s normally :p Unfortunately here in the south of France pumpkin is not really a staple food. When Halloween approaches the big supermarkets import a few pumpkins but whatever they don’t manage to sell is sometimes being offered for weeks after as prepacked pumpkin slices. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences so whenever I buy pimpkin I’m extremely careful. Luckily at the moment the markets here do have a few pumpkins lying around and they still appear to be fresh.

When I decided to make this soup I thought about adding a little fresh ginger to give it a spicy kick. Although I’m not a big fan of ginger the outcome was surprisingly good, however if you don’t like ginger don’t add any.

Ingredients

• 500g of pumpkin
• 2-3 carrots
• 1 onion
• 250 ml vegetable stock
• 1 tsp of grated ginger
• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 slices of bread (white bread works nicely but you can use any sort of bread, I for one used black bread here)
• 2 tsp of paprika powder
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• crème fraîche (optional)
• finely chopped parsley (optional)

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1. Peel and clean the pumpkin. Cut into small pieces.
2. Chop the onion finely.
3. Heat the vegetable oil in a large saucepan.
4. Peel, clean and cut the carrots into small pieces.
5. Put the carrot into the saucepan with the hot oil and cook them at medium heat for about 5 minutes.
6. Add the onions, the pumpkin and the ginger and cook everything for approximately 15 minutes on medium-low heat. (Or until the carrots and the pumpkin are nicely soft)
7. Add the vegetable stock and bring to a boil.
8. Put the soup aside.
9. Cut the bread in cubes and drizzle them with olive oil. Powder them with a little paprika and put them in the oven at approximately 180 °C.
10. Either use a food processor or an immersion blender to blend the soup until the texture is nicely smooth.
11. Run the soup through a sieve and remove the croutons from the oven.
12. Add salt and pepper to the soup if needed.
13. Serve with a little crème fraîche and chopped parsley. (optional)

Serves 4.