Too much pumpkin? Make pumpkin mushroom soup!
August 19, 2016
When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. But what about when you’re handed an abundance of canned pumpkin? You make pumpkin mushroom soup.
That’s exactly what volunteers and students from The Culinary School did last week when we had canned pumpkin that was close to expiration. A small group of volunteers individually opened 100+ cans and scooped out the pumpkin, more than 300 pounds worth! Talk about a time consuming, but very important process!
Once the pumpkin was scooped it was time for our Chef Instructor Donnie 
Stephens and our Newark culinary students to create a tasty pumpkin mushroom soup.
This particular recipe called for canned pumpkin, vegetable stock, cinnamon, syrup, carrots, celery, onions, heavy cream and oyster mushrooms! Oyster mushrooms were donated by KSS Sales, the distributors for a mushroom farm called Kennett Square Specialties in Avondale, Pennsylvania!
The group used stick blenders to smooth out the ingredients and large vat in our kitchen was used to cook all of the ingredients into a thick, delicious sweet and savory soup – 70 gallons of soup to be exact!
The finished soup cooled overnight. Next, a group of volunteers from JPMorgan Chase ladled the soup into plastic family-sized bags and vacuumed sealed them. The finished bags were placed in the freezer and will be labeled with nutrition facts. The finished product will be distributed to Delawareans in need through our network of partner organizations!
This is our first time re-purposing product for our partner organizations, so we hope families served by our network enjoy it and it’s the first of many Food Bank recipes!
