The pumpkin I carve goes into soup the same day

Every year at the end of October the kitchen table disappears under newspaper. One big pumpkin, a sharp knife, a spoon for scraping, and a pile of orange flesh and seeds that used to go straight in the bin. Now that pile is supper, and the lantern on the windowsill is the side dish.

Before I cut anything, I wash the pumpkin under the tap and scrub off the soil: the knife goes through the skin and carries whatever is on it into the flesh. Then I take off the lid, scrape out the seeds and stringy bits, and cut thick pieces from the inside wall, leaving enough to hold a candle. The flesh goes into a roasting tin with a sliced onion, two cloves of garlic, a little oil and salt, and roasts at 200°C for about forty minutes, until a knife slides in without effort and the edges have browned.

Everything goes into the pan with hot stock, simmers for ten minutes and gets blended until smooth. The roasting is what makes it: the soup tastes sweet and a little smoky, not like boiled pumpkin. On top I put a spoon of soured cream and a handful of seeds, rinsed, dried and toasted in a dry pan until they pop. What we don’t eat I cool quickly, and within two hours it’s covered in the fridge. We finish it within two days, reheated until it’s steaming hot all the way through.

A word about the pumpkin itself. The big round pumpkins sold for carving are perfectly edible, but they are grown for size and a thin wall, not for flavour. Their flesh is paler and more watery than a squash such as butternut, and a little stringy. That is exactly why I roast it rather than boil it: the oven drives off some of the water and concentrates what sweetness there is. If the soup tastes thin, half a butternut squash roasted in the same tin makes a real difference, but it is not essential.

Carving day is also a kitchen day, so I treat it like one. I clear the table and the board first, wash my hands before I start, and use a clean bowl for the flesh I am going to cook, separate from the bowl for the stringy bits and anything that has fallen on the newspaper. The pieces for the soup go straight from the knife into that clean bowl. The children do the drawing and the scooping with a big spoon; the sharp knife stays with me.

I only use flesh that looks and smells fresh: firm, bright orange, no soft or dark patches, no mould anywhere near it. If part of the pumpkin is bruised or soft, I cut that part away generously, and if mould has got inside, the whole pumpkin goes to the compost and we buy squash for the soup instead.

The flesh doesn't have to be cooked the very minute it is cut. If carving runs late, I put the pieces in a covered container in the fridge and roast them the next day. What I don't do is leave a bowl of raw pumpkin on the worktop overnight.

The seeds are a treat in their own right. I pull them out of the strings, rinse them in a sieve, dry them on a tea towel, and toast them in a dry pan over a medium heat, shaking often, for five to eight minutes, until they puff and pop. A pinch of salt at the end, and the children eat half of them before the soup is ready.

The quantities are loose, because every lantern gives a different amount. From one big carving pumpkin I usually get about a kilo of flesh, enough for soup for four with one onion, two cloves of garlic and about 750 ml of stock. If you get less, use less stock: it is easier to thin a soup than to thicken it.

One thing I don’t do: I never cook the lantern itself after it has stood carved for days with a candle inside. The soup is made from what came out on carving day. The lantern does its job on the windowsill and then goes to the compost.