WELCOME TO MY GARDENING BLOG!

I obviously hope you enjoy browsing through the postings on here - do feel free to leave comments as it's always good to see who's visiting and to hear about other people's experiences - after all you never stop learning do you?

If you've any gardening questions or you live in Brittany and are looking for some gardening help - be it design work, planting or general gardening or you simply would like some advice, please don't hesitate to CONTACT ME or call me on 0033 661 77 23 89 (from UK) or 0661 77 23 89 (from France).

Happy gardening!

Tuesday 4 December 2007

Nothing better when you get in from the cold....

but a great bowl of warming PUMPKIN SOUP!



Pumpkins are generally easy to grow and extremely greedy, so make sure you supply them with plenty of good compost or well-rotted-down manure - some people even resort to growing them on their compost heaps! I'm being serious!
This was one of my prized items which I grew this year and it's been put to great use today when I made 2 large batches of Pumpkin soup! Not wanting to waste yet another wet day... The Pumpkin is an extremely versatile vegetable and ideal for soups - you can add all sorts of spices and flavours too. For one of the batches I ground down some of the coriander seeds that I'd saved over the summer. Fresh root ginger is also good, as are bayleaves, cardamon pods, orange zest cinammon, nutmeg and I could carry on - a lot depends on individual taste.
One way to avoid the arduous task of peeling all the rind off is to cut up the pumpkin into segments, scoop out all the seeds etc and roast them, flesh-side up in the oven, with a bit of Olive oil drizzled over the top and some salt and pepper plus any spices - cook at around 200 degrees C for about 40 mins and then the skin can be easily removed leaving the lovely soft flesh of the pumkin ready for the liquidizer. It also has a nice
smokey flavour too.
The other way is simply to peel the hard skin off and cut the flesh into chunks and add to something like chicken stock and a mix of herbs - equally good but quite different in flavour to my other suggestion. If you've got any favorite soup recipes - do post them here in the comments section....
Last but not least do save some of the seeds - wash them and dry them properly and keep them in a dry place ready to plant out next season. You'll be aware that you won't always be able to reproduce plants that are true to type as it depends where the original seed came from in the first place. A lot of the F1 hybrid varieties of seeds will not re-produce... always worth a try though! This is just one of the reasons it's best to buy organic vegetable seeds.

2 comments:

Marguerite said...

Je fais très attention de ne pas mettre mes graines de potiron au composteur... Sinon, après j'ai des pieds de potimarron qui poussent partout. Du moins il y a deux ans. Car cette année comme j'avais fait attention et que je n'en ai pas semé non plus, je n'eb ai pas eu un seul...
Ce n'est pas grave, jachéte mes potimarrons et je fais de la soupe. Mais également de la tarte... SALéE !
Yummy !
(Cela ne me dérange pas de lire l'anglais, l'écrire, c'est plus difficile)

Miranda Bell said...

C'est un bon idee Marguerite.... Je crois que c'est beaucoup plus dur d'ecrire que parler dans un autre langue!... en plus, j'ai un ordinateur de l'angleterre - il n'y a pas tous les accents pour les lettres - c'est encore difficile! J'espere que vous pouvez comprendre mon Francais!!