by Caroline

It’s November in San Francisco, which means that I am facing the annual disconnect between the food my New England-raised body feels like I should eat and the food appropriate for our sunny and warm days. The New Englander in me says “Turn on the oven! Roast vegetables! Make soups!” while the Californian wants a salad.

This week, the New Englander won.

I’ll link to the recipe I followed for pumpkin black bean soup, with a reminder that it is soup, so you can be flexible. I roasted the smallest of our CSA pumpkins and scooped all the flesh into the soup pot, without measuring, but it was probably more like five cups. My cans of black beans are 15 ounces, not 19, so that’s what I used. I didn’t have any canned tomatoes, but did have some of last summer’s frozen roasted balsamic tomatoes (made without the leeks and pureed immediately into a sauce) which looked like about two cups (but I did not measure.) I had about a tablespoon of sherry left in the bottle, so tossed that in with a glug of last week’s Sauvignon Blanc. The soup was delicious, and it’ll never taste quite the same way as it did last night. That, to me, is one of the charms of soup.