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For ten long days, I had a Crown Prince Pumpkin sitting in the middle of my kitchen table, it was slowly becoming a permanent feature. We ate around it, silently admiring its pale, flawless green flesh. I kept thinking it was too beautiful to butcher and too grand to dice or cube! It wasn’t until one afternoon, sitting in The Cake Cafe on Dublin’s Camden Street, that it occurred to me what weird and wonderful things I could do to my prince. Ultimately it is a food, an ingredient to be shaped and utilised into a pumpkin head, pumpkin pie, fritters and soups.  So I decided, to be turned into something delectable is surly a better way to go then rotting on my table top! 

I’ve no doubt it was the gorgeous atmosphere of The Cake Cafe that inspired these notions of culinary adventure. Situated to the rear of Daintree Paper Mill,  everything about this little cafe tickles the senses; the smiling staff, kooky furniture, leaking teapots and parade of mouth-watering cakes swept me away in a creative wave. Inspired by the smells and sounds, I furiously began jotting down comforting food combinations into my notebook. One of my favourite recipes from that afternoon, and one of life’s most simple pleasures, is Piping Hot Pumpkin Soup with Home made Brown Bread. It’s my belief that soup can heal both mentally and physically, in my experience, it can have the same effect on your serotonin level as a double chocolate brownie! ♥

The soup is my own creation but I can’t take credit for the brown bread, it came compliments of Trish from Mullingar. She is famed amongst her friends for her rustic brown bread and was very generous in letting me in on her baking secrets. Trish firmly believes that behind every good recipe, are good ingredients and this is why she uses only the finest Irish produce to bake her bread; Macroom Wholewheat Stoneground Flour and Howards One Way Stonegrond are combined with bran and pinhead oats to create a nutty and robust loaf. She encouraged me to play around with the dry ingredients and so I’ve added some sunflower and linseed for increased seedy goodness. The results were sublime, this recipe is simple and delicious and should definitely be attempted at least once in a life time!

What I love about this recipe is its simplicity, but also it’s adventure, it gave me ample excuse to play around with some less familiar ingredients and cooking methods. I have an abundance of sage growing in a large Belfast sink in my back garden and can rarely think of anything interesting to do with it except onion and sage stuffing and I’m not a huge fan of stuffing. Thankfully, fried sage is a beautiful garnish for pumpkin soup, it’s a strong and robust herb that marries well with the sweetness of the pumpkin. It’s also good for you ♥. The Latin for this often neglected perennial is salvia, which means “to heal”, it has been credited with the ability to relieve inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and even enhance memory. It is also reported to support digestion which is why it is commonly combined with fatty meats like pork and beef.

Another excellent reason to buy and cook a pumpkin is for its seeds. I think I may have raved on about the brilliance of these seeds before so I will briefly recap – they are nutritional gold –  25g of pumpkin seeds can provide over 20% of the our daily allowance of iron. They contain a vast amount of both manganese and magnesium which are crucial for bones, cartilage and tissues maintenance. Magnesium deficiency is also symptomatic of depression and insomnia so fortifying your diet with these little beauties will aid sleep and stabilise your mood!

As always, enjoy enjoy enjoy xxx

Recipe creation: Caroline Murray and Trish Malloy

Food styling and photography: Caroline Murray

Prep/cooking time (soup, garnish, bread): 2 hrs

Serves: 6

♥ Spicy pumpkin Soup
Ingredients

• 2 medium onions, peeled and chopped
• 40ml olive oil
• 900g (2lbs) pumpkin
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 300g of ripe tomatoes, or 1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
• 2 pints of good vegetable stock
• Finely grated nutmeg to taste
• ½ tsp cumin seeds
• ½ tsp coriander seeds
• salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. In a heavy-based saucepan, toast the coriander and cumin seeds for 2 minutes, grind the seeds in a pestle and mortar and add 30ml of olive oil; reserve for baking.
2. Wash the pumpkin under warm water, removing all dirt. Cut in half and scoop out all the seeds and soft fibre. NB: Do not discard! The seeds are gorgeous roasted, check out recipe below.
3. Preheat the oven to 200C, cut the pumpkin into chunks and put in a roasting tin. Drizzle with the cumin and coriander infused olive oil and season generously with salt and pepper. Roast for 45 minutes, or until soft and coloured around the edges. Turn and shake the chunks once or twice during roasting.
4. Remove the pumpkin from the oven and allow it to cool, when cool enough to handle, remove the skin from the flesh.
5. In a heavy-based saucepan, sweat the onion in the remaining oil until soft but not browned, add the garlic and cook for a further 2 minutes.
6. Add the roasted pumpkin, chopped tomatoes, vegetable stock and simmer for 15 minutes.
7. Blend the soup until smooth and transfer to a clean saucepan. Heat the soup until piping hot and garnish with the fried sage. Serve with brown bread and real butter.

♥ To garnish: Fried Sage and ground peppercorns with cumin and coriander seed
 Ingredients

• 2 tbsp rape seed oil or sunflower oil
• Salt and ground black pepper
• 12-16 sage leaves

1. Heat the oil in a small pan, when the oil starts to bubble add the sage leaves, fry for 5/7 seconds or until crisp.
2. Transfer the fried leaves to some kitchen towel to soak up the excess oil.
3. Before serving your Spicy Pumpkin Soup, throw a few fried sage leaves on top of the soup.
4. Grind a tsp each of the peppercorns, cumin and coriander and lightly sprinkle over the soup with the fried sage, this really lifts the flavour with every mouthful!

♥ Trish’s Brown Bread, Makes 2 loaves
 Ingredients

• 150g Howards One Way Stonegrond
• 350g Macroom Wholewheat Stoneground Flour
• 75g bran
• 75g sunflower and brown linseed
• 25g porridge oats
• 25g pinhead oats
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 heaped tsp bread soda sieved
• 1 lt butter milk
• 2 loaf tins; 5 x 8in

1. Preheat the oven to 180C.
2. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl.
3. Add the buttermilk to the dry ingredients.
4. Mix well, if the ingredients seems too dry, add a little more buttermilk.
5. Grease the bread tins generously with butter and flour and divide the dough between the 2 tins.
6. Sprinkle any remaining sunflower and linseed mix on the top, they will toast up beautifully in the oven.
7. Bake in the oven for 1hr
8. 20 minutes before cooking time is over, turn the loaf upside down to brown the bottom, reducing the heat to 160C, this will give you a nice crunchy crust while ensuring that the loaf is baked perfectly.

♥ Roasted pumpkin Seeds
Ingredients

• Pumpkin seeds
• Sea salt

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 180C
2. Remove the seeds from the fleshy fibres and rinse under cold water.
3. Lay the pumpkin seeds on a baking tray in a single layer.
4. Sprinkle with sea salt and roast for 30 minutes.

TIP: it can be a bit of a job removing the seeds from the flesh! I did it by adding the mulch to a colander and massaging it with cold water, the flesh disintegrates down the drain and your left with beautiful pale big seeds to roast.

TIP: Soaking the pumpkin seeds in salt water for 24hrs before roasting them, this deactivates enzyme inhibitors in the seeds. These enzyme inhibitors can irritate the stomach and prevent the absorption of essential nutrients. Soaking the seeds also enhances their flavour as the seed becomes more porous. There are lots of variations on the typical salted pumpkin seed, try adding cinnamon or nutmeg for a sweeter garnish over yogurt and fruit or soya sauce and chilli powder for stirfrys.

 I hope you enjoyed the recipe, now get cooking!

• Recipe: Spritely Halloween Pumpkin Soup with Lemongrass, Chilli & Ginger (eatlikeagirl.com)
• Cheap and Delicious Holiday Pumpkin Recipes (mint.com)
• Spiced Pumpkin with Goat Cheese and Lentils (thedailymeal.com)