Meat Free Monday: Hachapuri and pumpkin soup

This week's meat-free Monday is some serious comfort food. What could be more satisfyingly rib-sticking than a big bowl of velvety pumpkin soup and a wedge of crusty bread oozing with salty cheese? Not much! I've posted soup and cheesy bread before of course, but I think this version is the zenith of the combination.

The bread is Nigella Lawson's recipe for hachapuri from Feast. Hachapuri, or khachapuri seems to be pretty much the national dish of Georgia, and it is so delicious I can well understand why. Just as a side note, it looks as though the "puri" in hachapuri means bread in Georgian, which must have drifted up the silk route from Indian puri/poori, wouldn't you think?

Nigella's recipe makes a lot. A lot. I made a half-quantity and it would have made 6 generous portions easily. As it was, we stuffed ourselves for dinner, then warmed up the leftovers and stuffed ourselves for lunch again the following day. The combination of soda-leavened crusty bread and copious quantities of oozy white cheese was irresistible. I actually think you could probably reduce the amount of filling by a third and it wouldn't suffer greatly, but as it was it was decadent and delicious, with the mixture of ricotta, feta and mozzarella providing a perfect balance between creaminess, saltiness and stretchiness.

I'm sure everyone has their favourite recipe for pumpkin soup. Because of the richness of the hachapuri, I wanted my soup to just be very, very simple. It's not at all lacking in flavour though. As it happens, the soup is vegan (not that it matters when there is this much cheese around...) but if you weren't making the hachapuri you could add a swirl of sour cream at the end.

Pumpkin soup

Olive oil

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

1 pumpkin (this was an acorn squash, but kabocha or butternut is good too)

1 litre veg stock

salt, pepper & mace

chives to garnish

Sweat the onion and garlic in a little olive oil in a large pot until translucent. Add the peeled and seeded pumpkin, cut into chunks, then cover with the vegetable stock. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes or until the pumpkin is really tender. Allow to cool a little, then purée (I used a stick blender, because the more effective blender is more hassle to wash up). Reheat the purée gently, seasoning with salt (if needed, it may not depending on the stock you used), pepper and a pinch of ground mace. Serve sprinkled with snipped chives.

I'm sharing this very simple soup recipe with Deb, for her long-running Souper (soup, salad and sammie) Sunday event.

By the way, I've added a couple of widgets to the side-bar. You can now subscribe to my RSS feed, if that is how you roll, and there is a search function. Don't know how well the search function works!