Butternut Pumpkin Soup with Four Cheese Dumplings

I've been terribly slack with both soup making and soup blogging this winter, but I'm back, with a fabulous effort. This soup came into being for our family dinner tonight. It arose from a wonderful mix of opportunity and circumstance. My husband moved my recipe file so that I glimpsed a pumpkin soup recipe tucked way in the back that I'd been meaning to make for two years! I combined it with the leftover 4 cheese tortellini filling in the fridge and magic was created.

Fabulous colour, wonderfully pleated dumplings!

Butternut Pumpkin Soup with Four Cheese Dumplings

1 kg butternut pumpkin, peeled, deseeded and diced
1 litre chicken stock
2 tsp low GI sugar (Logicane)
1 bay leaf
150ml creme fraiche
Sea salt and freshly ground white pepper

16 cooked homemade 4 cheese dumplings

Place the pumpkin, stock, sugar and bay leaf into a saucepan, bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes, or until pumpkin is soft.

Remove the bay leaf from the pumpkin mixture, then blend in high speed blender until smooth. Return the soup to the pot and bring it to a simmer. Add creme fraiche. Season with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, boil a pot of salted water. Add dumplings cook for 2-3 minutes until done.

Serve soup in bowls topped with 4 dumplings.

A mere sprinkling of truffle salt is totally MAGIC!

Notes
I'm not all that crazy on butternut pumpkin, I much prefer the sweeter more intensely flavoured Jap/Kent pumpkin. But I do like trying it in different recipes every so often, everyone else seems mad on it. This one worked really well and was totally delicious.

The soup recipe is based on a recipe by Guillaume Brahimi from Bennelong restaurant in Sydney, originally published in Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, August 8 2009 (published two years ago to the day! Karma). I halved the amount of creme fraiche he used, and substituted his garlic croutons with my 4 cheese dumplings. In his recipe he passed the blitzed pumpkin through a fine sieve- I did that to be true to the recipe, but it didn't really need it, after I had blitzed it in my fab new Thermomix. The texture was amazing.

The dumpling mix was left over in the fridge from last nights dinner. A four cheese mix of ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan and blue cheese with freshly ground nutmeg. Mr Soup had made home made pasta the day before, but I can't be bothered with all that, so I used gow gee wrappers instead of pastry for the first time- it was so simple, worked really well- and none exploded. That's a win in my book.  I'll definitely be using them again. 

I used a commercial chicken stock for this recipe. One of those tetra pack ones. I think it needed some water, especially when I ate the leftovers the next day. The soup was really too thick, and probably a bit salty.

This post is linked to Weekend Cooking, a fabulous weekly meme at Beth Fish Reads.