Creamy dreamy coconut...soup?

So Thursday is unofficial soup day en la casa Merino. Mostly because we don't go home on Thursdays, so dinner is in the cafeteria at my work (so romantic...*gufaw*). We have small group in West Mississauga on Thursdays, and it would make no sense to go home and then pass by work to go to small group, so we eat at work! And since soup is one of the easiest meals to heat up, and it goes oh so well with toast (my work has both toaster and microwave) it ends being my default for supper on Thursdays.

*disclaimer: we don't always eat at work on Thursdays. We do go out on occasion, but that adds up quickly every week (not to mention it's not much of a date night) so soup it is!

This soup recipe is actually what we had for dinner today! I made it on the weekend and knew I wanted to have it Thursday. It is quite different, and while I'm itching to make some tweaks, I think I will definitely make it again (plus, hubby likes it)!

The best thing: it's made in a slow cooker!!!

Thai Pumpkin Coconut Soup (Canadian Living, Nov 2012)

What You'll Need

• 8 cups peeled and cubed pie pumpkin or winter squash
  
• 1 red onion, chopped chunky
  
• 2 tbsp fresh ginger grated
  
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
  
• 1 small red chili pepper, diced tiny
  
• 1 can (15oz) coconut milk
  
• 3 cups vegetable broth (or substitute 1 cup water and 2 cups broth)
  
• 2 tbsp fish sauce
  
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
  
• 2 tbsp lime juice (about 1 lime worth)
  
• 1 tbsp packed brown sugar

What to Do

1. Combine first five chopped ingredients into slow cooker. Pour coconut milk, vegetable broth and fish sauce over top. Stir once to mix liquids.
   
2. Cover and cook on low for 5-8 hours. I cooked mine for 6 (I have a fairly small size slow cooker) and it was perfect. I'm thinking you're going for quite soft pumpkin pieces, but not to the point where they are disintegrating - have them keep their shape a little to have the fiber thickness.
   
3. Puree soup until smooth. The recipe says to use an immersion blender. I only have a stand up one, so I used that but found that some of those slippery onion pieces got free of the blade, so an immersion blender might be better.
   
4. Add cilantro (which I actually chose not to do...but I think I wish I had), lime juice and brown sugar. Stir together to disolve sugar, and serve hot, or freeze for up to 3-5 months!

Notes: I ended straining out some of my liquid from the soup because I found it was too watery. Now this is because I only got about 4 1/2 - 5 cups of pumpkin out of my pie pumpkin, so I needed less liquid, but I chose to cook it all and then strain it out. This also let me make the soup the consistency that I wanted - i prefer a bit more thick soup, so I strained a good 15-18oz out into a mason jar to save for something later! (not sure what yet...). If you get all 8 cups of pumpkin, you'll probably need all the liquid! But you may want to strain out the chunks to blend and then re-add the coconut broth when you're done blending, to get a smoother texture.

Happy 'cooking'!
r.

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