Forget Lettuce Soup, I Like Pumpkin Soup!

I had a bunch of little pumpkins sitting around in my kitchen so I decided to roast them and make soup with them. I found a couple of recipes on the internet, and since my vegan daughter was visiting I merged the two recipes into one and came up with a very yummy vegan version. Basically, I took these two recipes: Vegan Pumpkin Coconut Soup from About.com and Spicy Pumpkin Soup from Simply Recipes and combined them based on their seasonings and vegan-ness. I felt the Spicy Pumpkin Soup had more to offer in the seasoning realm and I sought to incorporate the vegan recipe into the non-vegan one. The end result was delicious!! Even my meat-and-potatoes husband loved it. The final recipe involved substituting one 14-ounce can of coconut milk for all of the milk and heavy cream listed in the spicy pumpkin soup recipe and of course substituting vegan margarine for butter as listed but staying with the seasonings. I have to say, it was "to die for." Oh, and I did use 6 cups of roasted pumpkin as opposed to the 3 cans of pumpkin puree which is the alternative. I think fresh pumpkin is definitely the way to go taste-wise. And it's not that hard to do if you have a nice, sharp knife.