Pumpkin soup, Thai Iced Tea, and Blue Stone

One of my all time favorite soups I've ever had was a pumpkin soup I once had at someone's house. Although I've never found the recipe, I've since loved pumpkin soup. It being October and pumpkin season, we decided to try making pumpkin soup ourselves. Unfortunately, when we tried in the beginning of the month, stores had not yet stocked canned pumpkin so we made a corn chowder (to be blogged about later).

Tonight, however, we were trying to decide what to make, and we realized that we hadn't yet made pumpkin soup. I found this recipe online and decided to try it: http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/pumpkinsoup.php

Though of course, with a few variations. I'll walk through the recipe.

Before I came over, Christina roasted 2 red peppers with olive oil and vinegar in the oven for 10 minutes.

After picking up 6 carrots, a large onion, and a pint of nonfat half and half (though they were out of the pints so we got a quart), we came back and starting chopping ingredients. The onion we tried mincing in the blender, but it didn't work so well so we got biggish (about dicing size) chunks (which we later discovered was better anyhow). We also blended the red pepper pieces to a mince. And then we minced 8 cloves of garlic in the blender as well. For the carrots, after peeling them we tried grating a couple of them but then gave up and blended them as well.

We then heated our wok, and added about 3 tbsp of ghee, and then the onions/garlic/pepper. Once the onions were about transparent, we added the carrots, two 15 oz cans of pumpkin from TJ's, some salt, pepper, thyme, paprika, and sage. After mixing, we let it simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Last, we added the pint of half and half and let that heat up. Christina came up with the brilliant idea of adding a tbsp of curry powder, which really improved it. I needed more salt, but that was easily added in the bowl. Quite yummy recipe, and definitely to be made again.

To accompany the soup, we made Thai iced tea from a tea mix we bought at 99 Ranch. The directions called for 4 tbsp of tea per cup of water, but that was obviously a typo -- we added 4 tbsp to the 1 litre pot, and that was plenty strong, even after icing. Filled a collins glass with ice, poured in tea, added 1.5 tbsp sugar, and a spoon full of condensed milk. Yum!

For our auditory pleasure, we listened to Blue Stone (http://www.blue-stone.cc/), a band I discovered today on Pandora.