Butternut Pumpkin Soup with Sour Cream and Roasted Seeds

The Butternut is back, bitches! Sorry, just enthusiastic. This time in the form of a comforting soup. It was a bit of an experiment since I read somewhere that for a lot of pumpkin kinds you can leave the skin on as long as you make sure it's soft enough by cooking/roasting/...! This seemed like a game changer, since removing the peel of a pumpkin is just so much work, especially if you don't have a decent big knife like I do at Uni... :( Plus it would means wasting less, so I'm all for it. I'm also roasting the seeds to add to my soup as a crunch at the end, so I literally used the whole pumpkin! I wanted to make it more an oriental tasting soup, but didn't have any ginger and I'm already adding coconut milk to my dinner. But I'm thinking an excellent version of this soup would be with ginger, maybe some lemon grass, definitely a bunch of coriander and coconut milk. I did end up adding a bit of (light) sour cream to cut through that comforting, slightly sweet pumpkin flavour. Since I wanted some more colour and thought it would go well I added some (frozen) parsley and of course my toasted pumpkin seeds.

I decided to back to the two tier recipe format. I thought it unnecessary with 'easy' recipes, but honestly I like having the room to give you all the tips & tricks that I can which makes the recipe a little chaotic so it really does seem handy to have a shorthand version of it. Plus I have no doubt that most have little interest in my ramblings and are just looking for some recipe inspiration. If anyone has suggestions on how to make the recipes more readable/useable, be sure to let me know. Do you prefer them with photos at various steps? Plus I made a nice picture for you guys this time even! So I might do a little plating section again. Consider this my wintry valentine soup. Look at me, being all topical. This is another recipe of my own design so I might update this if/when I perfect/improve this.

Soup - 6 or more servings -  120cal/serving (800cal/whole pot) - 30min + 40min cooking

 (4.7g fat, 1.2g saturated; 19.3g carbs and 3.2g protein)

Cappuccino of Jerusalem artichoke and chestnuts soup with a goat cheese foam

A relatively easy, but fancy little soup of Jerusalem artichoke and chestnuts with a goat cheese foam, with a little espelette pepper sprinkled on. You'll be sure to impress everyone with this star soup! It's a perfect appetizer to make for an intimate dinner party or a large group of people: it's sophisticated, unique, yet comforting and easy to make! It does use some (semi-)unusual ingredients so you might have to make sure you find everything at your supermarket.
The only downside is that for best results you do need something to make your milk and goat cheese mixture foamy (like in a real cappuccino). I used an espuma/siphon bottle. But not to worry! I've read you can reach the same results by just blending it with a(n) (immersion/stick) blender. And if you don't have that, you can always just mix in the milk mixture, without foaming it first, though I wouldn't call it a cappuccino then. ;)
I made this soup as one of many appetizers for my mother's birthday (among which the mozzarella appetizer I posted earlier) and my whole family was a big fan! It would probably look really well served in clear glasses as well, so you can see the different layers. But I wanted to accentuate the cappuccino angle.
As previously I'll put up a short and long version of the recipe, but it really is quite easy, so there won't be that much difference between them I think.

6-8 small portions - 40 minutes