Hope you and your loved ones are all well and healthy.

I think most of us lovers of vegetables have a special pumpkin cream recipe--or more than one. Pumpkin cream is popular around the globe, not only because it's a budget friendly meal but because it's healthy, easy to prepare and delicious.

Today I've made pumpkin cream for lunch and couldn't miss the chance to share today's recipe with my fellow foodies on Hive 😁 I added a vegetable stew to make it more flavorful and also made an almond beschamel sauce to go with it. I hope you like it.

Cooking is, in many ways, like magic. We take a piece of of a pumpkin which Mother Earth has been so kind to offer us and we turn it into a delicious meal.

Joumou soup has a relatively recent origin, which can be traced back to Haiti's independence form France (1804). According to official records, Haitians invented pumpkin soup (joumou soup) to show France and the world they were able to work together in order to create something--good--. They serve this soup every January 1st to commemorate their Independence. As it happens with great dishes, almost everyone has their own version.

Usually, I keep it simple: I chop some onions and a bit of garlic and let them boil along with the chopped, unpeeled pumpkin chunks, and a bay leave. Then I add salt and pepper and that's it. And I tell you that it's delicious just like that, as pumpkin is a vegetable with a lot of flavor.

But as we know, we cooks love to vary the recipes to see how it turns out and even more if we can share it on our blog. Let me show how I prepared my #joumousoup today.

Ingredients:

For the pumpkin soup:

• 500 gr pumpkin
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 3 crushed garlic cloves
• 1/2 cups chopped green bell pepper
• 1 tablespoon crushed garlic
• 1 cup sweet chill pods
• 11/2 teaspoons paprika
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cups white wine
• 1 bay leave
• pinch of rosemary
• olive pomace oil to sautee the vegetables
• almonds and black pepper for garnish

For the Almond Beschamel Sauce:

• 3/4 cups soaked and peeled almonds
• 1 cup warm to hot water
• pinch of salt
• 1 tablespoon cane sugar
• 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1/4 teaspoons ground nutmeg
• 1 crushed garlic clove
• 1 bay leave
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1/2 cups water

Let's Make Seasoned Pumpkin Soup!

To season this soup, I used a vegetable stew.

I chopped the onion and green bell pepper and sautee them in a little hot olive pomace oil. I added the paprika and stirred well.

I added the crushed garlic and rosemary and let it cook well over medium fire so I could deglaze the pan.

I used white wine to degalze the pan. I poured it into the mortar to wash the crushed garlic that stuck to the walls.

Then, to the hot pan!

This always makes a delicious broth.

I put the lid on and let it simmer for about 10 minutes.

Time to cook the pumpkin!

To make a delicious pumpkin soup, the pumpkin must be smooth so that the peel is completely liquefied without leaving any crumbs. I remove the seeds and fibrous strands, wash it very well and cut it into pieces. Then I added enough water to cover the pumpkin and also added the onion, garlic, the sweet chili pods without their pedicels, the bay leaf, and salt.

I brought it to a boil over medium heat, until the pumpkin was soft.

I then poured half of the stewed vegetables into the blender--I will use the other half tomorrow in another soup--and the entire contents of the pot of cooked pumpkin.

I let the blender do the heavy lifting and that was it!

Almond Beschamel Sauce 😋

I made a beschamel sauce using almonds instead of cow's milk.

These almonds should be soaked for at least six hours to hydrate. I had these ready, frozen for a few weeks.

I peel the almonds and blend them in warm to hot water. I added a little salt and put it in my yogurt dripping bag to get the milk.

This time, I made the beschamel with what I had in my cupboard. I added margarine, garlic, nutmeg, bay leaf, salt and cane sugar, and I used cornstarch as a thickener.

I mixed all the ingredients together and let the sauce cook, while I stirred constantly to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Then I strained the sauce.

The sauce was thicker than I expected, so I had to add a little extra water to get the desired consistency. I poured the sauce into this icing bottle that no serious person would use in public 😁 and I shook it vigorously to homogenize it. It was immediately perfect to serve with the soup.

I served the pumpkin soup and decorated it a little with the almond beschamel sauce; I also sprinkled almonds and black pepper on top.

Bon appetite!

I hope you found this recipe useful! 😁 Pumpkin soup is a simple dish and it's really nutritious; we can always vary the recipe to make it fun.

All text and images are my own. I have taken the pictures with my Redmi 9T cell phone. And if any GIFs here, I've used GIPHY for all them.

Thank you so much for your visit :)

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