This is a good use of your obligatory halloween pumpkin, if you can't stand the notion of wasting food. If you DO use the halloween jack-o-lantern, you have to do this AS SOON as it's done scaring trick-or-treaters: the pumpkin gets partially cooked by t
Serves: 8 Preparation time: Cooking time: Difficulty: Medium - some experience needed Dietry guidance: v v n g d
Ingredients
A pumpkin, or ...
4 cups pumpkin puree
1 cup soy milk
1/2 nutmeg
1 inch ginger root
1 tablespoon lemon
1 teaspoon vanilla
Method
Wash the outside of the pumpkin (especially if it just spent the night outside being a jack-o-lantern), cut it open and remove the seeds (unless you already did that when you made it into a jack-o-lantern) and cut it -- skin and all -- into small pieces one or two inches square. Put the pieces into a large pot with a tightly-fitting lid, add water to just below the top layer of pumpkin pieces. Bring to a boil and simmer until the pumpkin is soft (an hour or more).
Drain the pumpkin pieces, and puree them in a blender (or press through a food pulper, in which case the preparation time goes up -- WAY up!). Store any extra pumpkin in one-cup ziploc bags in a freezer container in the freezer until needed.
Puree the ginger root in the blender or processor using the lemon juice and soy milk as flux for the blending process (or grate with a fine grater).
Combine the pumpkin, ginger, vanilla, soy milk and lemon juice in a covered soup tureen. Grate in half a nutmeg. Put the tureen in the oven on the lowest rack. Heat at anything between 300 and 400 degrees depending on what it's sharing the oven with, for about half an hour, stirring occasionally.