Pumpkin Expolsion

In the spirit of fall and with Halloween around the corner, I decided to make pumpkin soup. I've never actually eaten it before, but I was reading a book and in it, they were eating pumpkin soup and the recipe was even included, and it sounded great. I imagined myself in a warm sweater, sipping soup, watching the leaves turn color and fall to the ground, and the whole thing sounded great. So I bought a pumpkin and cleaned it out and prepared to make myself some delicious soup.

Let's be really clear. These little fantasies involving me being domestic need to end. There is a reason my mother and grandmother burned their bras and sought higher education. It was so that future generations of women didn't have to stay at home making homemade soup. And in the future, I need to remember that liberated feminist= enough sense to go buy homemade soup from a nice restaurant or a high end grocery store. But I did not remember that today. Today, I played 50s housewife in the kitchen... And reminded myself the hard way why I don't want to be that.

Pumpkin soups sounds easy. The basic idea is that you combine vegetable stock with milk, add spices, dump it all into the cleaned out pumpkin, toss the whole thing in the oven for two hours, stirring occasionally to get the mushy pumpkin inside mixed with the liquid. In the end, you should have creamy, pumpkin-y soup inside a pumpkin.

At the end of two hours I had mushy pumpkin filled with something that looked a lot like runny vomit. But I had high hopes that if I stirred it and it sat a minute or two, maybe I could still have my little Autumn fantasy with soup and crunchy leaves and goodness.

And then I watched the pumpkin drain rapidly, ignoring the foil I had wrapped around it (to prevent dripping into my oven) and gushing all over my the floor, under the stove, into the drawer thing on the bottom of the stove and even getting into the heating vent next to the stove. Luckily I had pulled the metal oven rack out to check the pumpkin and so my hot (hard to clean) oven was spared from the majority of the drainage. Be aware: a half gallon of liquid can cover a kitchen faster than you can react to the soft pumpkin it was cooking in collapsing. It was a pumpkin explosion.

It took longer to clean up pumpkin soup than it did to prepare it. And I never actually got to taste it. And I'm pretty sure that for a while, every time the heat goes through the kitchen vent, it will smell like pumpkin. Lesson learned.