Driving to Tangkuban Perahu near Bandung, you can’t miss these fresh vegetable and fruit stalls.

Therefore, stopping on the way back to buy a few is a given. This week Souvik went to Bandung on work, and I asked him and the driver to get me a couple of pumpkins. They came back with 9.

NINE? Yeah.

After laughing my head off, I was rather taken up with the idea of cooking them in as many different ways as possible. Friends are sending me suggestions and recipes, and I’m gonna try as many as I can until we get sick of eating pumpkin. Oh we’ll invite people to share too. Until they get sick of us.

Started off the challenge with puréeing 3 of them. Dinner tonight was pumpkin soup with cheesy toasts. The soup recipe came out of my head, with some inspiration from different recipes I saw on the internet. In typical Indian style, my measures are inexact, so you’ll just have to keep tasting and adjusting flavours.

Savoury Pumpkin Soup for two:

Ingredients: 1 tbsp butter, 1 medium-sized onion, finely chopped, 3-4 garlic cloves chopped, 1 cup pumpkin purée, 1″ cinnamon stick, 2 cloves, 4-5 black peppercorns, ½ tsp garam masala, 1 stalk of lemongrass, 1-2 tbsp coconut milk, salt to taste, sun-dried tomatoes, jalapeños (thinly sliced)

Method: Heat butter in a pot and sauté the onions and garlic for about 2 minutes. Add the spices and lemongrass, and the pumpkin purée. Add 3-4 cups of water and bring to a boil. Add the tomatoes, jalapeños, then the coconut milk and salt. Simmer for 5 minutes and serve hot.

The soup was a great blend of creamy and spicy, and the lemongrass added that x-factor to the flavours. We polished it off.