Eat Your Pumpkins Part 2: It’s What’s For Dinner

When we think of pumpkin flavors, desserts and fancy coffee drinks come to mind first. I love that stuff too, and we are going to talk about dessert in part 3 of this series.

But, I really want you to discover the amazing flavor that pumpkins can bring to your dinner game.

The possibilities are endless. But, here are two simple and delicious ways to share the flavor of the season at your family dinner table.

Before you start, be sure to read Part 1 of this series to prep your pumpkin ahead of time. With a freezer full of pre-processed and measured pumpkin puree, these recipes are dead easy to throw together for quick weeknight dinners.

Even better, they freeze beautifully so you can effortlessly get delicious healthy food on the table another day.

Speckled Hound: an excellent choice for making savory dishes

1 Easy Pumpkin Soup (with simple variations)

Back in the twenty teens, I spent quite a bit of time in Kazakhstan for my job. A colleague and I used to love to have dinner at a neighborhood place that specialized in food from Southern Germany.

While it was fun to sample everything on the menu, without fail, we always started the meal with a cup of the most delicious pumpkin soup. Here’s my riff on the starter soup from “The Schwab Haus” in Almaty.

Ingredients:

• 2 -3 C Pumpkin puree

• 1 medium onion

• 1T Olive Oil

• 1-2 cloves of garlic

• pinch of salt

• 1 C vegetable or chicken stock

Instructions:

1. Finely mince the onions and garlic

2. Heat the olive oil in your soup pot and sweat the onions down when the oil is hot.

3. Add the garlic toward the end and cook with the onions until the garlic is fragrant. Be careful not to burn it. a minute is plenty.

4. Stir in the pumpkin, add salt to taste, add the stock and heat through.

5. At this point you can whiz it up with an immersion blender or blitz it in a blender/Vitamix to make it smooth.

6. Garnish with some croutons and serve.

It can be that simple.

Or you can get creative and modify from that base. Here are 2 of my favorites:

1 Add curry powder, ginger, and hot sauce. You could also stir in spinach, coconut, and a protein like chicken or pork to make it into a full blown curry and serve it over rice.

If you do that, skip the stock to make the sauce a little thicker.

2. Make it into what my kids used to call “Sunshine Soup” by adding carrots, sweet red or orange peppers, and orange sweet potatoes to cook into the soup before blending. Talk about a hit of vitamin A and lots of delicious flavor.

3 Pumpkin, sage, and Italian sausage pasta sauce

Pumpkin makes a delectable sauce an any type of pasta, gnocchi, or even on a pizza.

I scored some amazing Italian Sausage from our neighbors at Texas Ridge Farm in Deary that really makes this dish shine. But you can use any sausage you have on hand or skip the meat entirely if you want to make it vegetarian.

You can use any type of pasta for this sauce. But I look for shapes with some texture to capture the good stuff.

Ingredients:

• 2 C pumpkin puree

• As many cloves of garlic as you like. I’m good with 3

• 1-2T Olive oil (optional)

• a nice handful of fresh sage

• 1 T fresh thyme or 1 tsp dried

• Salt and pepper to taste

• 1/2 pound Italian sausage - sweet or spicy

• Parmesan cheese shavings to finish and hot pepper flakes if you like

Instructions:

1. Cut the fresh sage into ribbons and set aside.

2. Brown the sausage. Start the pan with a little olive oil if it’s on the lean side

3. Add finely minced garlic (as much or as little as you like)

4. Add most of the sage ribbons and fry with the sausage until it’s fragrant

5. Stir in the fresh thyme

6. Stir in the pumpkin and really deglaze the pan - using the moisture from the. pumpkin to incorporate all the pan brownings into the sauce

7. Season to taste with salt and pepper

8. Toss cooked pasta in the sauce to coat,

9. Garnish with parmesan cheese shavings, the remaining sage ribbons, and hot pepper flakes (optional).

That’s it!

Some people add a little heavy cream. I like it better without, but I’m probably in the minority there, so give it a go if that sounds good.

This sauce also makes an amazing base for pizza - add a little chopped kale and more parmesan (mozzarella is too mild) and you’ve got something special.

These two recipes barely scratch the surface of possibilities for cooking with pumpkins. I hope you get creative and have some fun with this too often overlooked star of the fall kitchen.