My curried pumpkin soup was a hit at Thanksgiving dinner! After telling how great a time I had on Thanksgiving with my family and sharing a bit of advice for an autism-friendly holiday party, I share my own pumpkin soup recipe, skip to the end.
I had a very blessed Thanksgiving this year! We had good food and good company, and filled the day with various activities in the most relaxing way. The highlight of our Thanksgiving was the quality and variety of the food.
The night before, I heard polite, although unsettling for the time of night, tapping on my BACK DOOR. If you are going to knock on the back door at 10:00 p.m., you’d better tap politely. I wasn’t too scared because the knocking was effectively polite. I turned on the porch light, and lo and behold, it was Uncle Casey with a large box of ingredients for the next day’s feast. Evidently, Lee and I didn’t respond to our texts or hear the front door. It was late, so he chose not to ring our phones, but still needed to get in. I mean, Lee has thrown pebbles at Casey’s verandah when he didn’t answer the door, so not much phases me with him.
We put the turkey in the oven at 275°F at 10:00 p.m. That’s what this was all building up to: why we put the turkey in after bedtime, because Casey reminded us to. We started Thanksgiving Day by cooking food and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade on TV.
We all took turns cooking. Lee let me know when it was my turn to cook.
🧩This is a bit of advice for Autistic Cooks: if you don’t like crowded spaces, designate your time to use the kitchen and keep everyone else out.
Casey praised me for making him sufficiently uncomfortable when I was using the kitchen. I do not like anyone else in my space when I cook or do dishes because, with the way my kitchen is shaped, it seems people dart around in circles around me. God forbid someone bump into me, or press against me to reach something. That sounds like a trivial issue, but it deeply offends me whenever that happens. I get territorial about my role in the kitchen. It took us several years to get where we are. Y’all, wait for your turn and stay out of my kitchen!
Everyone got their turn to use the kitchen. We set the table with my Great Grandpa Otto’s golden Lenox-ware. After dinner, we had a fire in the backyard pit. We played a party board game, Wits and Wagers, and we finished the night by watching a movie of Sabrina’s choice, The Cat Returns. Everyone in the house, except my sister, who flew in from Reno, NV, had seen The Cat Returns numerous times. It was nice to introduce Noelle to such a good movie.
The menu:
- Turkey
- Cornbread dressing
- Giblet gravy
- Homemade cranberry sauce
- Butternut macaroni and cheese
- Roasted vegetables
- Spicy jiffy corn casserole
- Pumpkin soup
- Candied yams
- Devilled eggs
- Shrimp and cocktail sauce
- Home-baked bread
- Apple pie
- Bread pudding, with *duck egg creme*
Pumpkin Soup
The pumpkin soup! That’s what this post is supposed to be about! My mom wanted to make pumpkin soup for Thanksgiving, but she didn’t want to carry it in her car, so she asked me to make it. She did a trial run a week before to show me what it’s supposed to taste like and tell me what she did with it. I used my mom’s recipe, looked up another recipe online to get an idea of what ingredients it’s traditionally supposed to have, and completely winged the measurements and cooked to taste.
The essentials for my mom’s and my pumpkin soup are
- pumpkin puree
- coconut milk
- yellow curry
Usually, bisques like pumpkin soup are perfectly smooth. Recipes online called for putting everything in a blender to smooth it out. One thing that made the pumpkin soup mine is that I decided it would be better with carrots and onion. I softened chopped carrots and yellow onion in a skillet before adding them to the soup.
What really makes both my and Mimi’s pumpkin soup what it is is the coconut milk. Most recipes call for heavy cream. The primary reason we chose coconut is that my mom doesn’t eat dairy. But, coconut is absolutely the best creamy flavor to put in a soup with yellow curry.
Curried Pumpkin Soup
Ingredients
- 1 can pumpkin puree
- 1 can coconut milk
- 1/3 cup chicken stock
- 2 tbsp yellow curry
- sage, about a tsp
- Pumpkin spice, a good sprinkle, about 1/4 tablespoon
- salt and pepper to taste, about 1/2 tsp each
- honey, a good drizzle, maybe 1/2 tbsp
- 1 small yellow onion
- chopped carrots, maybe three large carrots or two cups of baby carrots
- 1 tbsp minced garlic
- green onion
Directions
- Set the heat to low.
- Combine pumpkin puree, coconut milk, and chicken stock in a small pot.
- Chop carrots and onion. Carrots should be small and diced.
- Sauté carrots, onion, and minced garlic in vegetable oil in a pan on medium-low, until carrots are softened, but barely. Carrots shouldn’t be fully softened because they will have plenty of time to soften in the soup.
- Season soup with curry, salt, pepper, sage, and honey to taste. I used sage because a recipe called for it, but no one could taste it. Is sage necessary? Not necessarily. After seasoning to taste, season with pumpkin spice if it tastes too much like curry, to bring back the pumpkin flavor.
- Add sauteed vegetables to the soup.
- If the soup is not steaming, increase the heat to medium until it steams or boils slightly.
- Transfer the entire pot of soup to a small crockpot. Heat on medium, stirring occasionally, until it gets closer to mealtime. If the soup boils, decrease the temp to low.
- Let the soup simmer in the crockpot until it’s served.
You don’t really need to transfer everything to a crockpot, but it works better for allowing the soup to simmer for several hours. The real reason I used the crockpot was to free up space on the stove since it was Thanksgiving. I started with a pot on the stove rather than putting everything straight in the crockpot so I could control the temperature and ergonomics; I wanted my soup pot close to my pan with the vegetables.
I thought about adding butter to the soup to make it good, like it needs a secret ingredient. Butter is a secret ingredient my MIL sneaks into a lot of things, like her vegetable soup. But the soup was so very good as it was, without butter. The coconut milk sufficed. Next time, to add butter without adding a copious amount, I would substitute the oil with butter when sauteeing the vegetables and see if it makes a difference. I think the oil that got in with the vegetables did make the soup a little extra rich.