For the Love of Local Farmers, Eat Your Produce!
Kayla Parker, Seacoast Eat Local Intern
For the Love of Pumpkins!
With halloween coming up at the end of the month, there are pumpkins everywhere! Did you know that there was a difference between the type that you carve and the ones you can eat? I sure didn’t! Sarah from Seacoast Eat Local gave me this great, simple recipe idea, but as I set out into the market to do my shopping, she told me to make sure that I asked the farmers which one I could use to make a soup. I spotted a plethora of beautiful pumpkins over at the Riverside Farm’s tent and headed over. I told the farmer what I was looking for, and she helped me pick out a sugar pumpkin that would work for my recipe of the week.
Why You Should Love Pumpkins
Pumpkins are a delicious type of winter squash that is extremely versatile in cooking. They can be eaten sweet, as in a pie or mashed with cinnamon, or they can be made into a savory soup, like the recipe I have added below. Pumpkins are a nutrient dense vegetable, at only 30 Calories per one cup cubed, They are a good source of B vitamins, Iron, Magnesium and Phosphorus. They are also a very good source of vitamins A, C, E Potassium, Copper, and Manganese. Vitamin E is a fat soluble vitamin that acts as an antioxidant to help protect cells in the body from oxidative damage by free radicals.
Nutrient profile from nutritiondata.self.com
How To Love a Pumpkin
Local “Soup in a Pumpkin”
Ingredients:
1 sugar pumpkin
1 qt chicken or vegetable broth
1 Leek
3-5 Cloves of garlic
Rosemary
Sage
Parsley
Salt to taste
Move wire rack in oven down far enough that the whole pumpkin will fit in. Preheat oven to 400 F
Cut off top of pumpkin and scoop out insides. (Don’t throw out the seeds, these are great for drying and roasting for a snack later!) If the stem of the pumpkin is long, cut it so that it’s no more than a ½ an inch tall to prevent it from burning. Place pumpkin on a baking pan or sheet.
Thinly slice the leek and garlic and place in bottom of the pumpkin. Add chopped rosemary, sage, and parsley
Fill pumpkin with 1 qt chicken or vegetable broth and place pumpkin top back on
Cook pumpkin for 1 to 1 ½ hours or until pumpkin feels soft. This will ultimately depend on the size of the pumpkin that you used**
Remove pumpkin from oven, scrape insides into broth, add salt to taste, and serve hot
For an alternative way to serve this delicious soup, puree the pumpkin with some of the broth. This modification was my personal favorite!
** The recipe I used said 2 hours, but I checked on mine after about one hour and 20 minutes, and as you can see, there was some browning and 1 hour would have been sufficient.
Recipe modified from Purewow.com
