Pumpkin soup with Morocan flavours and chickpeas

Its a rainy day here today. A welcome change from the dreary, cold, overcast days with no rain. It was starting to look quite dry again and a lot of people are feeding their stock. A great day to eat soup for lunch. I think soup is one of the great pleasures of winter and i am more than happy to eat it every day of the week for all of the winter months. I do get tired of the same old flavours though so put a bit of thought into how I would make my latest batch of Pumpkin soup. I also wanted to make it a bit more substantial with the addition of some pulses. What I settled on was a roasted pumpkin soup with a vaguely Moroccan sort of theme and the addition of Chick Peas. I've had the wood stove on in the kitchen most days and found the dried cookpeas cooked wonderfully well when I placed them in some cold water, brought that quickly to the boil and then put the lid on and pushed them to the back of the stove to cook on a slow simmer for about four hours.
I cut a Jap pumpkin, from our garden, into large chunks, tossed it with a bit of oil, one dried chili, a bit of salt and pepper and about a teaspoon of Cumin, I also tossed in three whole, unpeeled brown onions. I roasted all this in the oven until cooked. Then squeezed the onions out of their skins, which I discarded, and pureed the pumpkin and onions with the liquid from the chickpeas and about half of the chickpeas. I then added a cup of the chickpeas whole and a bit of salt and pepper. To serve I finely chopped some preserved lemon and put that on top of the soup with a dollop of my homemade yogurt. Very flavoursome. Lucky us, we had a loaf of bread straight from the oven to enjoy with the soup.