Welcome, plus pumpkin soup!

Ever cooked up something really tasty, on the fly, and then kind of forgotten the exact recipe? It's really annoying. You try and try to get it 'right' again, but it never seems to work... bollocks to that I say!

So, partly, that's one of the things I'm hoping to achieve with this blog - a regular account of meals cooked, and what went into them. I also want to talk about food in general - good ingredients, awesome places to shop in the inner city of Sydney, and even the odd restaurant review.

By way of a quick bit of background, I'm not in any way trained - but I love food, enjoy cooking, and really like making my food as presentable as possible. A well-plated dish is a joy even before you start tucking in. So without further ado...

Rustic Pumpkin Soup

My partner and I are part of a food co-op, which is a fancy way of saying that once a fortnight, a group of the twenty-odd people in it wake up at stupid o'clock and head out to Flemington markets to get a mess of food. It's a great way to shop - you get very fresh produce (often still muddy-fresh!) that lasts a lot longer than store-bought goods. And it's a deal cheaper, too.

But you can sometimes end up with a lot more of something than you really know what to do with. A couple of boxes ago we ended up with a large pumpkin - I think it was Japanese (or not - see comments), but it's pretty much all nommed now so don't quote me. We roasted it, put it in thai curries, but still had a fucktonne of the stuff. So cue the classic pumpkin soup, especially as it's now getting cold enough to really enjoy something this hearty.

Ingredients

Roughly a third of a pumpkin

Three dutch cream potatoes

Head of garlic

Two brown onions

Ground nutmeg

Ground cumin

Fetta

Goose fat

Chicken stock

Salt & pepper to taste

Remove the seeds and soft stuff from the pumpkin, cut into relatively small chunks, and remove skin. Wash potatoes and chop up; I leave the skin on, but you can remove if you want. Slice the top off the head of garlic, and place all ingredients in a baking dish, along with a generous spoonful of goose fat (oil will do just fine, but I loves me some goose fat!).

Bake at a high temp until it's all just starting to soften, and then remove from oven.

Roughly chop the onions and add to a large soup pot, then add the roasted ingredients; remove the garlic cloves from the skin by squeezing out with a fork on your chopping board, and add them too. Cover with a litre of chicken stock (I cheated and used bought stuff, but like all dishes, this would really benefit from a proper stock prepared yourself). Add a generous dash each of the cumin and nutmeg - though you might not want to add quite as much nutmeg as I did, given I somehow unscrewed the entire top and dumped in something like three teaspoons! Season with salt and pepper to taste, but remember the stock will add a lot of salt itself.

Then just cover it up and let it boil away. Once everything's starting to fall apart, get a masher and move the job along - no need to get it smooth, as the rougher texture is what this is all about. Let it simmer along for another few minutes, repeat the mashing, and take off the heat.

Ladle the steaming orange goo into bowls. Crumble some fetta off a fresh block with a fork and sprinkle on top; add some freshly ground black pepper, and then a garnish of continental parsley and coriander.

Turned out pretty well if I do say so. This was the first time I'd added nutmeg, and let me tell you it really lifts the dish, making for a much more complex flavour. The fetta adds a sharp contrast to the richness of the soup (the partly caramelised pumpkin is seriously flavoursome), and the touch of fresh green herbs cleanses the palette as well as looking damn good.

It also cooks up quite a lot. One bowl along with some crusty bread is more than filling, so you can freeze the leftovers and get at least one other meal out of it.

I'd also recommend checking for random hairs before photographing... ah, the perils of being one of the last long-haired men in Sydney!