When I lived in Brooklyn, I tried to make my mother’s pumpkin soup. I used both canned and real pumpkin and added Polish kielbasa for flavor, but it just didn’t taste as good. This Miami chill beckons the real thing—a spicy soup-stew made of fresh pumpkin, cho-cho (Jamaican word for green squash), turnip, handmade, white dumplings and beef, the perfume of thyme, garlic and onion filling the space like music. Normally I eat the soup with a couple slabs of hard dough bread, but I haven’t recovered from the hard-dough-bread-ferrero-rocher smorgasbord I endured during the holidays. Feel me?
