Gleaned soup

Don't you hate it when you take a look at the recipe prior to starting dinner only to realize that it requires something that you should have started in the morning? For this evening's meal the ingredient was shredded cooked chicken, which is very easy to do in the crock pot but not so easy to do an hour or so before dinner. So, that recipe was moved to sometime this coming week and we punted.

This usually means that either a. we order pizza because I don't have the energy to think or b. I look at the ingredients I have kicking around and see if I can come up with something that will pass for dinner using them. Tonight we went with option b. Sometimes I actually enjoy looking at the odds and ends we have and see if I can turn them into something before they go bad. Since we had some pie punpkins (gleaned from a nearby field which had been tilled under and we found a few survivors) I decided to make a roasted vegetable soup, using the basic idea behind my actual roasted vegetable soup recipe. It would be a little different because along with the pumpkins (I used two) I also had some onions, some garlic, and two bags of baby carrots that were not going to survive much longer. They all got roasted in the oven together. I felt virtuous for not buying pizza and using up the carrots before I had to throw them away.

The next step is to put all the vegetables into a pot along with some chicken stock and heat it up. Once the stock has come to a simmer, I then take my immersion blender and blend it up. With the original recipe, there are enough different vegetables that it only needs the addition of a little salt. This, with a lot of pumpkin and carrots was pretty bland. That would be bland as in I didn't want to eat it bland. And if I didn't want to eat it, I was pretty sure it would be a hard sell for the masses. Since it needed some kick, I added in quite a bit of curry powder along with the salt and pepper which would have gone in regardless. This helped quite a bit, but it still felt too bland. Enter coconut milk to the rescue. I always pair curry with coconut milk in other things, so why not this soup. The addition of the coconut milk helped immensely. I still added in another good dose of curry powder at the end. It was exactly what my carrot-pumpkin soup needed. 

Usually we serve homemade croutons on top, so to add to my virtuosness, J. had brought home a bag of cubed bread from some social thing as school. This was the perfect thing to use for croutons, which is what I did. It was all essentially a free dinner with items that were free or that are always in my pantry. I love that. 

If you want to make a similar soup... which is great for using up bits of vegetables, here is how I did it.

Spray as many baking sheets as you need, peel and roughly cut up your vegetables and toss them in olive oil. (Add in onions and garlic if you can.) The pumpkins were cut in half (pole to pole), cleaned out, and put face down on the baking sheets. I piled the other vegetables around them. These baked for ~ 1 1/2 hours at 425. Stir the vegetables every so often. When everything is well roasted, put all of it (scooping out any squash) into a large pot with chicken broth in it. I think I used about ten cups. Heat the stock to a simmer and puree using an immersion blender. Add salt and pepper to taste. Sometimes this is enough, but if you want the curried version, I probably added several tablespoons of curry powder and one can of coconut milk, mixing it all in with the immersion blender. Top with croutons.