Nuts For Pumpkins

What is it with Americans and the pumpkin?

Pumpkins have a special role in this country: they're not just a fruit, they're a seasonal mascot. We carve faces on them and call them Jack O'Lanterns (in an earlier post I mentioned our October visit to see 4,000 carved, illuminated pumpkins), we chu(n)ck them, we compete to see who has the biggest one.

In addition to all of that, we just love to eat them, in every conceivable form from pumpkin beer to ice cream, soup, lattes, pies, breads, pastas, and beyond. This is unique. In other countries, there's not so much fanfare. The humble pumpkin is just another type of winter squash.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I love pumpkins! Nothing gets you into the holiday season like eating something made with pumpkin. Unfortunately for the home cook, they're a real pain to prepare. Almost anything you want to do with a pumpkin involves peeling it, removing the guts (which smell putrid...what a wild contrast there is between raw and cooked pumpkin. God bless the man or woman who first thought to cook something as smelly as a pumpkin), cubing its flesh, cooking it, and pureeing it.

Canned pumpkin puree is widely available (two different brands are pictured above), but I've been told by chefs that there's "no comparison" between pureeing a good pumpkin yourself and using the canned stuff. One of these days I'm going to test it out by making side by side pumpkin soups, breads, and pies comparing fresh vs. canned pumpkin.

Yes, one of these days, right after I back up my hard drive and alphabetize our DVD collection.

Here are some fun facts about pumpkins:

-Out of the seven continents, only Antarctica is unable to produce pumpkins.

-As one of the most popular crops in the U.S., 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkins are produced each year.

-The town of Morton, Illinois, the self-declared pumpkin capital of the world.


And here's a summary of this week's pumpkin consumption:

-On Sunday night, Halloween, I drank Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale (very tasty, pictured above) and we watched lesser-known Hitchcock movies - specifically, Stage Fright and The Lady Vanishes.



-On Monday night, I made pumpkin soup, and I used a real pumpkin to do it. Isn't it pretty? Almost too pretty to eat, I think. Almost.

When it comes to tackling whole pumpkins, there are a couple of things that will help you out: a very sharp knife, and a Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale. Once I survived the tedium of peeling, gutting, and cubing the pumpkin, the rest was a piece of cake. The soup turned out to be very tasty, thanks in part to 1/4 cup of shaved Parmesan added in at the end, which lends a richness and tang (the recipe calls for Gruyere, but I didn't have any on hand, although for whatever reason I always seem to have a cache of half-used domestic Parmesan in the fridge). The recipe is from Fine Cooking, it's very healthy, and can be found here. In retrospect, I think the soup would have been even better if I added sherry. Every soup is better with sherry.




-Last night I made pumpkin bread, using canned pumpkin, and it wasn't very good at all. Just flat. Dull. By the time I finished eating a slice this morning, I had already forgotten about it. I don't know whether to attribute that to a shortcoming of the canned stuff, or the fact that I decided to "wing it" instead of using a recipe. Probably a combination of the two.

And that, friends, is the pumpkin report.