Hello lovelies,
now that the temperature has dropped and autumn begins, I will spoil you with an appropriate recipe: Autumn minestrone with pumpkin and chestnuts. The best recipes develop coincidentally and that’s exactly how it was with this delicious minestrone. It now sits alongside plenty of other ideas in my autumn collection of pumpkin recipes.
Since the autumn school break will start next week, I have made it my goal to go less shopping and empty the pantry and freezer. Obviously I still had a pumpkin in the house – I hardly go without one in autumn – and I actually found most of the other ingredients in the freezer. A spare pumpkin never idles around here for long anyway; give me a slow afternoon and it turns into vegan pumpkin ravioli with sage butter. Chickpeas, kidney beans and chestnuts – furthermore veggie left overs and peels which I keep in a small bag to make bouillon. It was quickly obvious that I will cook a minestrone with exactly these ingredients. I found some chard in my raised garden bed that has recently grown again. If you like cooking with whatever the pantry and garden give you, have a look at all my soups and stews too.
BOUILLON FROM LEFT OVER VEGGIES
At first I made a bouillon. When I have let over veggies or peels, I collect them in a bag in the freezer to turn them into a bouillon. You can use almost anything for it – onion and carrot peels, also broccoli stem, fennel or celery pieces. Simply sauté onions and garlic in a pot, add the frozen left over veggies, deglaze with wine and add some water. Let it simmer for about 1 hour and you have a delicious base for soups made out of left overs and food waste. Of course this isn’t necessary for this recipe but rather a tip for you. Small pasta shapes turn a soup like this into a full meal, and they all live in my collection of pasta dishes.
The minestrone turned out really delicious, especially the interaction of pumpkin and sweet chestnuts truly amazed me. I made the soup for lunch and ate 2 plates right away. We had them again for dinner with the girls and they liked it as well. Child 1 picked out the kidney beans but liked the rest, child 2 ate 2 (in words: two!) full plates and assured me over and over again this is the best soup I have made in a long time – music to my ears.
As you can see on the pictures we like a lot of vegetables and less bouillon in our soup. But of course you can vary the amount of bouillon just the way you like it. The minestrone was particularly tasty to me with fresh parsley and some grated vegan parmesan (for instance from Violife). And aren’t the small noodles cute? I recently found them in an Italian store. Should you ever spot vegan girasoli on a shelf like that, take a pack home; those little filled parcels only need a brief steep in the hot broth of my light minestrone with girasoli.
Of course you can vary your veggies and use up whatever is in your pantry, freezer or fridge and needs to be eaten.
If the transition from summer to autumn was a little too sudden for you too, I can recommend this delicious autumn minestrone with pumpkin and chestnutsto you. It definitely warms up body and soul and is perfect for left over foods and kids like it – what more can you ask for. And once this pot is scraped clean, the next one to hit our stove is usually the creamy cauliflower-potato soup with mini-falafel topping, which brings two more quick autumn soups along in the same post.
If you love this autumn minestrone with pumpkin and chestnuts, more warming autumn ideas are waiting in my kitchen: for a classic I adore my creamy pumpkin soup, for a second minestrone I love the minestrone with savoy cabbage and white beans, and if you prefer your pumpkin baked, be sure to try my autumn lasagne with pumpkin.
Enjoy the sunny autumn days!
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