Vegetable and Chorizo Soup

One of those things, you've been to the supermarket, bought some ingredients, then you come home and your partner suggests something for tea you'd not planned for.  Today was 'soup'.  Now soup is easy, you can often make it from store cupboard ingredients but I didn't fancy lentils (I've over lentil-ed recently, even though I love lentils, you can have too many) and pumpkin is so autumnal.  So this was the result.

My husband astutely pointed out when I told him what we were having it was "the stuff which was in the fridge".  Yes.  Sometimes inspiration takes the form of cooking the "stuff which is there" and the "stuff which needs eating up".  I like to think there is more science to it than that but, let's face it, sometimes there isn't.  Still, despite that, my husband described this as 'delicious'.  I've not tried this with my son yet but it's the kind of thing he likes, definitely full of flavour and he has a bit of a thing for chorizo.

Vegetable and Chorizo soup - Serves 2 adults

Ingredients

120g Chorizo, cubed
1/2 Onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
500g passata
1/2 red pepper, finely diced
200g pumpkin (peeled weighed), finely diced
1 tsp smoked paprika
Fresh thyme

Method

Fry the chorizo and onion together gently until the oil starts to run from the chorizo and the onion softens.  Add in the pepper, paprika, garlic and pumpkin and fry for another minute or so.  Add in the passata and simmer, covered on a gentle heat until the pumpkin is cooked and soft.  For me this took a good 30 minutes but will depend on the variety of pumpkin.  Add some water if it's too thick.  I made this though to be good and chunky.

Add thyme to taste and serve.  Lovely with some crusty bread.

I've linked this up to seasonal inspiration.