Saturday encore ~ Confessions of a Pumpkin Hoarder

Have you recovered from your Thanksgiving dinner? I haven't. I'm still in the mood for food...particularly orange food. Blame it on the twice-baked sweet potatoes with chipotle pecan streusel. The secret ingredient in that recipe was the chipotle chile powder, which my Walmart in the middle of nowhere had on the shelf, much to my delight. It's my new favorite spice, and I can't wait to add it to the soup below the next time I make it. Which just might be today.

***

I found this soup recipe on Tasty Kitchen last winter, and it is so easy, delicious, comforting, elegant ... ok I'll stop now... because I could go on and on and on about how wonderful this soup is. Here's the link to the recipe. It's called Velvet Pumpkin Soup. I won't bore you with step-by-step pictures and instructions. Basically, you sauté some onions in a pot, add a few spices, dump in some chicken stock, canned pumpkin, and evaporated milk, and you're done. The key to the soup, as far as I'm concerned anyway, is the velvety texture. The recipe says you can puree it in a blender in batches, or not. I've tried it pureed and I've tried it chunky – pureed is definitely the way to go, except for the getting-the-blender dirty part, when you have to clean the blender and all the vessels and utensils you've dirtied transferring the soup from the pot to the blender and back again. Anyway, I made this soup so often last winter that I decided it was high time to buy one of these:

An immersion blender. I am normally not a gadget person, but this thing has become more of a necessity in my kitchen than a gadget. I may never use my regular blender again. Why disassemble, clean, and reassemble a blender when you can just eject the end of this thing and rinse it off?

I haven't used it to blend margaritas, only because I never thought of it until just now, but I'll bet it would do the trick. It might even mash potatoes. Heck, you could probably stir paint with it if you washed it off real good.

But getting back to the soup recipe... I learned a very important lesson last winter once I started making it, and I learned it the hard way. Grocery stores do not stock the main ingredient (canned pumpkin) year round. It is only available from about October through January. After that, you cannot find it on the shelves - at least in New Mexico, you can't. So if you do make this soup and fall in love with it (and I'm betting you will), start stocking up now.

A girl can never have too much land or too much pumpkin in her pantry. And you can quote me on that.