Buying pumpkin in Israel 101

I woke up this morning feeling all inspired to be healthy (after eating a billion and one pastries on our Jerusalem weekend) and decided to make myself my favourite veggie soup - pumpkin! Hurrah!  I walked myself to the supermarket but to my utter horror and despair they were fresh out of pumpkin.  Now, pumpkin isn't really something that you can really replace if you're trying to make yourself pumpkin soup, so disaster had really struck.

After reviewing my options (including attempting to make some sort of broth pumpkin soup sans pumpkin), I decided that my best chance would probably be to visit my trusted veggie man.

Now I'll admit, I've never seen pumpkin on his veggie shelves before but he really was my last chance if I wasn't going to abort my pumpkin soup mission.  After getting my groceries at the supermarket, I popped over to his store and asked him whether he had any pumpkin in the hope that it was out the back or hiding under a palate of onions or something.  And, thanks be to G-d, he replied yes and called his fellow veggie man (we will call him veggie man B for the purposes of this story) from the back to help me.

To my surprise, the pumpkin had been there all along basically staring me in the face under one of his veggie shelves and it was legit the size of a two year old child.  Veggie man B bent down to face the small child pumpkin and pulled out his carving knife (I am not kidding) as veggie man A asked me how much pumpkin I wanted.  A little shocked, I sort of motioned a decent square sized piece of pumpkin and bam - veggie man B cut me up a fresh slice of pumpkin and handed it to me upwrapped all ready to be taken home and turned into soup.  

So.... basically ... pumpkin shopping complete (of course I had my phone out the entire time to document this experience because it was too amazing).

I guess it goes to show that if you don't ask, you'll never know.

**pumpkin soup was a massive success.

MM x