{Parisian Pumpkin Soup}

We've been eating a lot of soup, at the beginning of winter I planned to make a soup a week and I have done that, you may have picked up on it if you are a regular here and if you don't like soup you may have lost a bit of interest but this will be the last one, promise, well for this year anyway.

With four weeks left of winter I've already got a lot of salad recipes lined up ready to try, we had a really good potato & egg salad last week which I'll post next time I make it, the day after we had the leftovers in beautiful sourdough ham sandwiches and I am still thinking about how delicious they were!

This is how they do the humble pumpkin soup in france, it is the only pumpkin soup I make since I tried it about three years ago, its full of sourcream and butter, its lush, bon appetit.

...the soup

1 kg pumpkin (I love kent)

1 litre chicken stock

2 tsp sugar

1 bay leaf

250ml sourcream

s+p

...the croutons

90g cold butter

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

1 tbsp parsley, finely chopped

2 thick slices of nice bread (I used sourdough)

Pop the peeled and diced pumpkin into a large saucepan along the with the stock, sugar and bay leaf, bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes or until tender. Let it cool a little, remove the bay leaf and then blitz it smooth, pass thru a sieve back into the pot and bring up to a simmer for a couple of minutes then reduce the heat and add the sourcream and s+p, stir till combined and gently heat it thru.

Remove the crusts from the bread and chop into large dice. Melt the butter in a frypan over a medium heat, add the garlic, parsley and bread and toss until bread is crisp and golden, serve a few in the middle of your pumpkin soup.