How hard it can be to make a pumpkin soup?

I got a call from my flatmate, asking me if I could make a pumpkin soup we could take to a potluck dinner later in the evening. I could stop in town and buy a pumpkin and a cooking cream on my way home, and make the soup while he was having a meeting in town. This way it will be ready when he gets back, so we can just roll over to the neighbour’s house with a big pot of what’s-going-to-be-a-yummy-pumpkin-soup.

“Sure, leave it with me, I’ve got this!” was my response. I mean, how hard it can be to make a pumpkin soup, right?

When I got home, my flatmate was already gone. But there was a Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minutes Meals cook book wide open on a kitchen table. Was it a coincidence that the book was open right on a page with a pumpkin soup recipe? I looked at the book from a distance first. Then I peeked closer and skimmed through the recipe. “Hm… it’s a very long recipe… and it involves shitloads of ingredients… and none of these are a cooking cream…” was what was going through my mind. “Why would he asked me to buy the cooking cream if it is not required by the recipe?”

I concluded that the open book was not meant for me. After all, he knows I cannot follow the recipes. “I will just cook the pumpkin soup in my own way!” was what I decided for.

Big mistake!

First of all, I have never cooked a pumpkin soup before, or anything that has to do with pumpkins, to be honest. I started cutting it, and learnt how damn hard pumpkins are. But somehow I managed to halve it. I got rid of the seeds and started to scoop out the pumpkin flesh, with a spoon. Now this was hard! As you can imagine, I didn’t come very far, but I thought it was sufficient.

I chucked whatever pumpkin I got into a large pot and added heaps of water (I wanted to make a big batch of soup, regardless that there was hardly any pumpkin in). I boiled it, added salt and pepper and because I was feeling extra adventurous I added some other spices as well! I was super proud of myself when I thought of adding veggie stock too. After a while I mixed it all with a stick mixer, poured in the cooking cream and simmered the whole thing for a relatively long time. The longer you cook it, the better, isn’t that how it goes?

As my flatmate returned home, he stood in the kitchen for a while, trying to figure out what was going on.

“Hm, what are you doing?”

“What do you mean? I’m making the pumpkin soup, as you asked me?”

“Hm…yeah… but why is the entire pumpkin still on the bench?”

“Oh that! That’s just the part that I couldn’t scoop out. I cooked the rest!”

Sceptically he approached the pot with my pumpkin soup slowly simmering. He took out a spoon-full, waited for a bit to cool down and tried it. “We are not taking this with us to the potluck dinner party! We will apologise, have a pumpkin soup cooking class tomorrow, and invite everyone over for the real pumpkin soup!”

“But I left the recipe on the kitchen table for you??” he also added.

“I didn’t think that was meant for me… there is no cooking cream in that recipe…”

“Well yes, that’s because I improved Jamie’s recipe by adding a dash of cream at the end.”

PS: The next day, we really had a cooking class and I learnt to make a delicious pumpkin soup (and how to get the flesh out of the skin by grilling the pumpkin for a while first).