Pumpkin Cheese Cake with a Dark Chocolate Cardamom Ganache

Die deutsche Übersetzung findet ihr unter dem englischen Rezept!

I have been told that "Pumpkin spice anything tastes like bilge water," and that "pumpkin pie is only good from the moment Thanksgiving dinner ends until the moment just after you have taken your first bite of it," and I accepted the challenge. I can't quite agree. At least not after I had a slice of this  Pumpkin Cheese Cake with a Dark Chocolate Cardamom Ganache. ^^ It's creamy and pumpkin-y and good!

Unexpected combinations: Beets + Orange + Chili + Hokkaido Squash

Today is one of those days where I started cooking with a vague idea in mind and it turned out great! I may even have discovered my new favorite salad!

These are the heroes of our dish: Hokkaido squash, oranges, beets!

And this is what our finished dish looks like: Ovenbaked hokkaido squash with a beets and orange salad with a sweet chili dressing.

Ingredients: 

• 1 Hokkaido squash
• 3 oranges
• beets (I had one big one, but just try to match the volume of the oranges)
• a bit of fresh ginger
• two garlic cloves of garlic
• some olive oil
• agave sirup
• sriracha (or sambal oelek or any other chili sauce)
• salt
• pepper

optional: a few pomegranate seeds for decoration

a bit of soy sauce

Spicy Hokkaido Squash Soup

It's soup season again! Finally!

We were fortunate enough to have the boyfriend's mother grow some fine examples of hokkaido squash for us and I could not wait to turn it into soup. Can you go wrong with hokkaido squash soup with orange juice, ginger, and sambal oelek? Yeah, I didn't think so. 

Where's the difference between a squash and a pumpkin? I'm not a native speaker of English, so I'm always excited to learn new things. My mothertongue German only has one word ["Kürbis"] for both types of vegetable, so I never saw a reason to distinguish between the two different vegetables.

So this was lunch for the boyfriend and me and also served as a nice present for my parents when we came to visit them.

The good thing is that soups like these do not rely on exact measures and diligently counted drops of ... something. Here's the rough draft of what I used and how I made it:

Spicy Hokkaido Squash Soup 

Ingredients: 

• 1 hokkaido squash 
• 500ml of veggie stock (we make tons of it and then freeze it)
• 500ml of pureed tomatoes 
• 300ml of orange juice
• 200ml of white wine (optional)
• 3 onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• some oil of your choice 
• a varying amount of sambal oelek, depending on your preferred level of heat)
• 1 can of coconut milk (I think I used around 400ml)
• a chunk of fresh ginger
• salt
• some pumpkin seeds