Steps

• Peel the pumpkin and sweet potato. (*)

  Cut pumpkin, sweet potato, and onion into pieces.

  Cut a ginger slice about a quarter-inch (0.5 cm) thick (**).

  

• Pour a quart of water (or vegetable broth) into a pot, add the ginger slice and, if you like, a Parmesan rind.

  👉 By omitting the Parmesan rind, the soup is naturally vegan; I used it for flavor as I didn’t add salt to the cooking water.

  

• Bring to a boil and cook with the lid partially on over medium heat for about half an hour.

  👉 Pumpkin and sweet potato have different cooking times. Check doneness by piercing some pieces with a fork.

  

• Once pumpkin and sweet potato are soft, blend everything directly in the pot using an immersion blender.

  ☝ The Parmesan rind I used was thin and softened enough to be blended with the rest. 😀 You can remove it before blending if you prefer.

  

• Once the cream is obtained, season with a sprinkle of dried thyme and cook over high heat for a few minutes, stirring with a spoon to adjust the consistency to your liking.

  

• Finally, toast the seeds for a minute or two in a small pan.

  You can use your favorite seeds; I really enjoyed this mix of pumpkin, sunflower, and flax seeds, but just pumpkin seeds are also perfect.

  

• Plate it, decorate with seeds, and finish with a drizzle of raw extra virgin olive oil.

  

• 👉 To enrich the dish, you can add a protein ingredient (which provides more protein than the small Parmesan rind 😉), such as a dairy product like yogurt, kefir, sour cream, ricotta, or a legume like chickpeas or beans.

  👉 As I mentioned in the introduction, you can serve the soup with bread croutons, which I suggest seasoning with garlic and herbs.

  (*) 👉 You can use pumpkin and sweet potato with the skin. In this case, they need to be washed well with a brush or a rough sponge. Sweet potatoes, in particular, concentrate a significant portion of their properties in the skin, which is why I usually prefer to cook them with the skin. For this recipe, I decided to peel both to 1) shorten the cooking time (due to the pumpkin skin) and 2) because I thought the sweet potato skin, being dark in color, might leave visible specks in the cream, making the final dish less ‘photogenic’ (look at how many things food bloggers have to consider when cooking! 😄).

  (**) 👉 To make the cream spicier, you can use a larger piece of ginger or add a pinch of paprika. To determine the right amount of ginger suitable for your taste, I recommend using two ginger slices and tasting the soup after cooking (before blending) and then deciding whether to blend everything with or without the ginger. If you opt for with, you can decide whether to blend both slices or just one. For me, I achieved the right taste by blending everything with just one slice of ginger, exactly this one:

  

• Enjoy! 🤗