Astrid's dinnner featuring pumpkin soup and jaffa cake

Astrid finally made it round for dinner tonight. The menu was:

Pumpkin soup
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AA Home Cooking Competition entry
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Jaffa Cake

Pumpkin Soup (adapted from Larousse Gastronomique)

Ingredients:
750g pumpkin pulp (i.e. peeled and deseeded pumpkin)
2oz butter
~1litre stock
3 slices dried white bread
Olive oil
Clove of garlic, crushed

Method:
1. Cut the pulp into pieces and place in a pan together with the butter and 120ml water. Cover the pan and sweat for about 20 minutes (or until the pumpkin is soft)
2. Add the stock and bring to the boil.
3. Allow to cool, season and liquidise with a hand blender.
4. Mix the olive oil and garlic in a large bowl. Cut the bread into croutons and toss in the oil. Either bake in a hot oven of fry until the croutons are crisp.
5. To serve re-heat the soup and ladle into bowls. Scatter croutons on top and swirl a little cream on top.

Main course

I'll not be putting the details up about the main course until the closing date for the AA Home Cooking Competition has passed. However, I will say that the main course included a smoked shallot puree.

I got some smoked hickory chips from Lakeland. In order to smoke the shallots I lined a suacepan with foil, put the chips at the bottom of the pan and sprinkled some water over the chips.
I then put the shallots in a collapsable steamer on top of the chips.

I heated the pan until smoke was produced. I then put a lid on, turned the heat off and left the shallots to steam until cool. The result was subtle but noticeably smoked shallots. Apparently Astrid reckons it was

"delicious"

Jaffa Cake

This was the same recipe as my pimped version (see previous post), but this time I put orange segments in the jelly and on top just under the ganache. I also managed to take a cross section picture: