Pumpkin Soup - DELICIOUS!

Last night's endeavour with the great refrigerator clean-up took me to a new level tonight. I had pumpkin left in the can from my attempts at making a pumpkin muffin in a minute - which turned into two minutes, but was still very good. I decided I was going to make soup though. I have never had pumpkin soup before, so I was worried it wouldn't taste very good. Boy was I ever surprised!

Ingredients:

4 cans of chicken stock
1 can of pure pumpkin
1 diced onion
2 cups chopped celery
1 cup whipping cream
1 lb ground beef
Ground sea salt and black peppercorn (to taste)

Directions:

Place chicken stock and pumpkin into pot together on medium-high heat. Stir together to get it all mixed up, and then add the onion and celery. Boil all ingredients together for just under an hour (or until the celery is not crisp anymore), and while the soup is boiling, you can brown up your beef and season it how you like. You'll notice it's a lot thicker then when you started. This is where the fun begins! If you have a hand mixer (like you would use to make fancy schmancy drinks), you can put it right into the pot and blend. Others prefer to blend in their blender in small quantities, and people who don't want to make a mess - like me - will just leave it all as is and not worry. I added the sea salt and black peppercorn (ground up) to the soup, and then put the ground beef into the pot as well and stirred. Once it was all mixed together, I added the cup of whipping cream and stirred until a consistant colour.

I'm always worried when making up recipes that they will turn out horribly...to date, the only thing I've messed up royally while cooking is a batch of cookies I made for my mother when I was little for Christmas. I was so proud of how they turned out that I didn't want to eat them, so I wrapped them all up and presented them to her on Christmas morning. I was giddy with excitement as she opened it up and marvelled at how yummy they looked. Then she bit into it. She asked me if I had tried them yet, and I was beaming letting her know I wanted to make sure they were all for her. She made me try one. Let's just say I quadruple check the salt amounts when using a recipe now.

This was fabulous though! My husband gobbled it all up and had seconds...and I had seconds, and placed the rest in the refrigerator for my lunch tomorrow.