The Best Thanksgiving Curried Pumpkin Soup
Posted on November 29, 2025 by Alison Rushing
My curried pumpkin soup was a hit at Thanksgiving dinner! After telling how great a time I had on Thanksgiving with my family and sharing a bit of advice for an autism-friendly holiday party, I share my own pumpkin soup recipe, skip to the end.
I had a very blessed Thanksgiving this year! We had good food and good company, and filled the day with various activities in the most relaxing way. The highlight of our Thanksgiving was the quality and variety of the food.
The night before, I heard polite, although unsettling for the time of night, tapping on my BACK DOOR. If you are going to knock on the back door at 10:00 p.m., youâd better tap politely. I wasnât too scared because the knocking was effectively polite. I turned on the porch light, and lo and behold, it was Uncle Casey with a large box of ingredients for the next dayâs feast. Evidently, Lee and I didnât respond to our texts or hear the front door. It was late, so he chose not to ring our phones, but still needed to get in. I mean, Lee has thrown pebbles at Caseyâs verandah when he didnât answer the door, so not much phases me with him.
We put the turkey in the oven at 275°F at 10:00 p.m. Thatâs what this was all building up to: why we put the turkey in after bedtime, because Casey reminded us to. We started Thanksgiving Day by cooking food and watching the Macyâs Thanksgiving Parade on TV.
We all took turns cooking. Lee let me know when it was my turn to cook.
Casey praised me for making him sufficiently uncomfortable when I was using the kitchen. I do not like anyone else in my space when I cook or do dishes because, with the way my kitchen is shaped, it seems people dart around in circles around me. God forbid someone bump into me, or press against me to reach something. That sounds like a trivial issue, but it deeply offends me whenever that happens. I get territorial about my role in the kitchen. It took us several years to get where we are. Yâall, wait for your turn and stay out of my kitchen!
The menu:
Turkey
Cornbread dressing
Giblet gravy
Homemade cranberry sauce
Butternut macaroni and cheese
Roasted vegetables
Spicy jiffy corn casserole
Pumpkin soup
Candied yams
Devilled eggs
Shrimp and cocktail sauce
Home-baked bread
Apple pie
Bread pudding, with *duck egg creme*
Pumpkin Soup
The pumpkin soup! Thatâs what this post is supposed to be about! My mom wanted to make pumpkin soup for Thanksgiving, but she didnât want to carry it in her car, so she asked me to make it. She did a trial run a week before to show me what itâs supposed to taste like and tell me what she did with it. I used my momâs recipe, looked up another recipe online to get an idea of what ingredients itâs traditionally supposed to have, and completely winged the measurements and cooked to taste.
The essentials for my momâs and my pumpkin soup are
pumpkin puree
coconut milk
yellow curry
Usually, bisques like pumpkin soup are perfectly smooth. Recipes online called for putting everything in a blender to smooth it out. One thing that made the pumpkin soup mine is that I decided it would be better with carrots and onion. I softened chopped carrots and yellow onion in a skillet before adding them to the soup.
What really makes both my and Mimiâs pumpkin soup what it is is the coconut milk. Most recipes call for heavy cream. The primary reason we chose coconut is that my mom doesnât eat dairy. But, coconut is absolutely the best creamy flavor to put in a soup with yellow curry.
Curried Pumpkin Soup
Serving Size:
Serves 6
Time:
15 minutes prep, 1+ hour simmering
Difficulty:
Easy
Ingredients
1 can pumpkin puree
1 can coconut milk
1/3 cup chicken stock
2 tbsp yellow curry
sage, about a tsp
Pumpkin spice, a good sprinkle, about 1/4 tablespoon
salt and pepper to taste, about 1/2 tsp each
honey, a good drizzle, maybe 1/2 tbsp
1 small yellow onion
chopped carrots, maybe three large carrots or two cups of baby carrots
1 tbsp minced garlic
green onion
Directions
Set the heat to low.
Combine pumpkin puree, coconut milk, and chicken stock in a small pot.
Chop carrots and onion. Carrots should be small and diced.
SautĂ© carrots, onion, and minced garlic in vegetable oil in a pan on medium-low, until carrots are softened, but barely. Carrots shouldnât be fully softened because they will have plenty of time to soften in the soup.
Season soup with curry, salt, pepper, sage, and honey to taste. I used sage because a recipe called for it, but no one could taste it. Is sage necessary? Not necessarily. After seasoning to taste, season with pumpkin spice if it tastes too much like curry, to bring back the pumpkin flavor.
Add sauteed vegetables to the soup.
If the soup is not steaming, increase the heat to medium until it steams or boils slightly.
Transfer the entire pot of soup to a small crockpot. Heat on medium, stirring occasionally, until it gets closer to mealtime. If the soup boils, decrease the temp to low.
Let the soup simmer in the crockpot until itâs served.
You donât really need to transfer everything to a crockpot, but it works better for allowing the soup to simmer for several hours. The real reason I used the crockpot was to free up space on the stove since it was Thanksgiving. I started with a pot on the stove rather than putting everything straight in the crockpot so I could control the temperature and ergonomics; I wanted my soup pot close to my pan with the vegetables.
I thought about adding butter to the soup to make it good, like it needs a secret ingredient. Butter is a secret ingredient my MIL sneaks into a lot of things, like her vegetable soup. But the soup was so very good as it was, without butter. The coconut milk sufficed. Next time, to add butter without adding a copious amount, I would substitute the oil with butter when sauteeing the vegetables and see if it makes a difference. I think the oil that got in with the vegetables did make the soup a little extra rich.
