Santa Fe Apple Pumpkin Soup
Dish: Soup
Taste: 4
Preparation: 5
Recipe: 4
Cost: $$
Repeat: Yes
http://soup.allrecipes.com/az/SntFpplPmpkinSp.asp
Taste: OK, first off, I changed the recipe a bit on the first time, big no-no. And it showed. Tastes kinda like a slice of pumpkin pie with a bowl of applesauce. Not surprising I s’pose. I substituted some cayenne for some of the chili powder in the recipe, to give it a bit of kick. Unfortuntaly, the cayenne buggered the taste a bit, and just made the afterbite … mushy? It wasn’t really “spicy” but you could tell it wanted to be spicy.
Preparation: Hands down trivial. Add the pumpkin, cream, applesauce, broth and spices and simmer 10 minutes. I put it in the crockpot, so I probably should have cut out some of the broth, but I didn’t thing of htat until I was stirring :/
Recipe: The recipe calls for chicken broth, I subbed vegetable broth. I’m vegetarian, it works :p It also wanted apple juice, but I’ve been “allergic” to apple juice since I was a baby (same reaction meat gives me these days). It’s probably not the actual apple juice, since I can eat apples, apple pie, apple cider, apple sauce, apple butter, yadda yadda yadda. The only apple product I apparently can’t handle is apple juice. Probably a prep thing 
But we threw in apple sauce instead, figuring it would add a bit of texture and work just as well. (It did). I was glancing at the recipe in the next room, so I threw in whole cumin instead of ground cumin (I don’t appear to have ground cumin, oops; the indian recipes call for whole). That … not so well. Crunchy hard seeds in the middle of a wholly liquid soup just don’t work right.
Cost: Pumpkin filling. Apple sauce. Whipping cream. Broth. Getting everything but the cream on sale isn’t too hard, but cream doesn’t keep so well. Total cost about 7 or 8$ I would estimate. The recipe is for 4 servings, however, so the price’ll go up easily.