Kabocha Squash
Posted by terrepruitt on November 26, 2018
Last week I decided to make pumpkin soup for Thanksgiving. Ever since our dads died we don’t really do Thanksgiving. My husband’s siblings are off with their kids and I don’t have any siblings. So we do our breakfast in Capitola – although we might have to actually eat breakfast somewhere else before going to Capitola as this year nothing was really open for full breakfast – and then we just eat whatever for dinner. Last year I didn’t even think to plan anything for dinner and I think we ended up going to Chavez market to get burritos. This year I decided to make pumpkin soup. The problem with that is pumpkins are gone from the stores by Thanksgiving. I sort of expected that, but I was HOPING there would be some, but there was not. I am very thankful for cellular service and Google – while standing in the store I decided to try something else. I was thinking any type of winter squash would work, it would just be squash soup. There was this not-so-attractive-green-pumpkiny looking thing and I looked it up and it is actually called a Japanese pumpkin. So cool. I decided to try the Kabocha squash.
As I said the Kabocha squash is also called a Japanese pumpkin. Wiki also said that it is even sweeter than butternut squash. I thought this was great as it would help cut down on the bitterness (although the Roasted Pumpkin Soup 2.0 recipe took care of that). The store also didn’t have any heavy cream so I got half and half. I thought that would be good too, since the kabocha squash is said to be sweeter. The half and half would be less sweet than the heavy cream so I was confident it would all work out fine.
Well . . . let me tell you, that Kabocha squash is SUPER difficult to cut. The skin is very thin, but it is super tough. It was a challenge. Not impossible, but way more time consuming than I had planned. I had planned to hop in the kitchen cut up the Japanese pumpkin and throw it in the oven then have time to do other things, but no, it was tough.
I roasted it with Milanese Gremolata olive oil, salt, and marjoram and it came out lovely. It is a very good squash.
Using it for the pumpkin soup was fantastic. It worked out great. I used the skin and all in the soup. I just roast it and then put the chunks in the blender. Now I know that I can get two sugar pie pumpkins and a Japanese pumpkin over the Fall Season. So that means one or two stuffed pumpkin dinners and/or making pumpkin soup one or two times.
We ate pumpkin soup for four days and we were actually sad last night to finish it. It was very good. Oh . . . . I did add a cup or two of broth each night when I heated it up. It got VERY, VERY thick. So I mixed in a cup or two (depending on how much I was heating up) to help thin it out.
Now you know you can make pumpkin soup with a sugar pie pumpkin or a Japanese pumpkin. Or perhaps you already knew that. Did you know about the Kabocha squash?
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