[image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/blissfulgirl/

I bought a pumpkin. First time ever, I think, because I’m not fond of Hallowe’en as a holiday – what’s wrong with bobbing for apples, eh? But we were going to a Sunday gathering at friends, and I thought a seasonal offering might be nice. I was planning a pumpkin gingerbread, only to discover that mine hostess already had a parkin on the go. And then time ran out, and the dog ate my cookery books, and it didn’t get used.

This monster pumpkin sat on the dining table, and guilt-tripped me every time I went passed it, so I vowed on Sunday to tackle the wretched thing in all its orangey pumpkinness. My plan was to roast it off, then bung most of it in the freezer for future soups, together with a tub with the last of  the current soup (I like a starter soup, bit like a sourdough starter. But soupier).  And a tub of plainish pumpkin purée for baking,  “A fine plan“, you cry, and it would have been; except there wasn’t a cubic inch of space in the bloody freezer, which seems mysteriously to have been filled almost exclusively with tubs of lentil and cauliflower curry. No, I don’t know either.

By the time I discovered this, I had dismembered the wretched vegetable (yes, I should have checked earlier, OK?). I was also slightly taken aback by just how much pumpkin a pumpkin holds.To buy some time, I distributed about two thirds of it onto a roasting tray, with some onions and carrots, olive oil and a drizzle of honey, and the rest on a roasting tray with just a little oil. And I even cleaned and roasted the bloody seeds (no waste here, no sirree Bob).

No amount of staring at the freezer, or rearranging its contents, conjured up any more space, so Plan B was brought into play (after it had been somewhat hastily formulated). Clearly last week’s soup would need to be eaten rather than frozen, but there wasn’t much of it. What there was was some vegetable tagine made a couple of weeks ago, which wasn’t really very nice; I’d overdone the harissa ever so slightly. Two tubs of that were removed from the freezer, thawed, and blitzed in the Magimix. The plain roasted pumpkin (just starting to catch on the edges) suffered the same fate.  They were both added to the Big Red Soup Pot. This made – hurrah – some space in the freezer.

The squash-with-other-veg was boxed up and put into the gap left by the veg tagine, and thus we will have soup for the next week or two without me having to chop endless bloody vegetables.

So I did beat this pumpkin, but it was a close run thing.