Broccoli cream soup for the winter days

I am not a big fan of soups, but I am trying to be a better cook and healthier mom so, I decided to make a change this season. Especially with another 2 months - at least - of cold ahead, I am curious to change the usual lunch routine and prepare at least one healthy soup the week. As a start, I tried to make from scratch a broccoli cream soup.

I used a medium broccoli, which I carefully cleaned several times, under hot water. I added:
3 gloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 pinch of salt
1 pinch of black pepper
1 pinch of zaatar
4 tablespoon butter
150 ml. cold skim milk

I put the broccoli in the blender, together with the milk and blended for around 2 minutes at high speed. I added in a pan the rest of the ingredients and warm it while carefully mixing at 250C. It is very important to mix often and slowly, in order to mix all the ingredients. Bring it to boil and serve it warm.

The preparation time is around 15 minutes. Most of the time I spent cleaning obsessively the broccoli. It serves 3. The cream soup has a good silky texture, but I realized that maybe it was too milky so maybe the next time I will skip the butter part. 

Bon Appetit! 

Pumpkins time

Image via Wikipedia//Not my Hokkaido local German offer

Autumn is already here for more than one month already and the winter is preparing to enter the stage. Sounds like a second grade composition but by now the weather is creating me a couple of adaptation problems.

I thought that now it is about time to try a couple of pumpkin combinations. As by now, for me it is very difficult to find in my Berlin area anything else but Hokkaido pumpkin, I bet on this choice, even some of my friends with serious experience in the area told me that better not. For me, it was the first time ever when tasting and testing such tasty dishes.

Mashed pumpkin

First action: cut the pumpkin into slices - not easy if you want to do it alone, girl - and boil it for about 40 minutes. After, peel it carefully and add in the blender together with: 1-2 pairs of garlic finely chopped, olive or sunflower oil, curry powder. If you want, you could add 1 or 2 carrots too. Mash it all together and serve it as an accompaniement to chicken breast or as a simple, separate vegetarian dish. Me, I chosed the last option and I felt a couple of hours after as a quiet elephant.

The Soup

For the soup, I put some 1 liter water to boil and added the mashed combination, plus some more salt. Mixed it from time to time and let the combination boil for maximum 15 minutes. In comparison with the mashed option, the result is a very light soup, to which I added some very sweet French bread.

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