Discover "long" pie pumpkins

We're in that transitional time when the golden days of fall can suddenly give way to a burst of winter. I like to think of it as squash-stuffing season. In the last few weeks, I've made everything from zucchini boats (with the last of the summer squash) to, finally, one of my favorites, pumpkin-stuffed-with-everything-good (the well-deserved topic of a previous post.)

When stuffing a pumpkin, the hardest part is cleaning out the cavity at the beginning. In fact, I can't help comparing it to butchering a chicken! You have to continually reach into the slimy insides and pull out all of those slick but tough inner fibers to do it. Still, the effort is worth it. While many cooks will tell you canned pumpkin actually has the ideal texture for breads, pies and soups (and I would agree) a fresh pumpkin is the perfect vessel for cooking a savory stuffing and scraping the baked flesh from the hot shell is the best way to appreciate it in all of its culinary glory.

For the last couple of years, we've been the beneficiary of "long pie pumpkins" from Venetucci Farm, an heirloom variety first grown on the East Coast. It struck me this fall that at least two of my gardener-friends hadn't seen them before and observed them with fascination. Is it time for more people to discover this special secret ingredient? How fortunate we are that small farms grow so many wonderful varieties of produce and introduce us to little-known treasures like these! Resembling an oversized zucchini, these oblong pumpkins have an odd shape but are filled with tender meat. 

Most importantly, they are perfect for stuffing! By carving an opening lengthwise across the top, which can be lifted off and put back in place once the cavity is filled, it is easier to get inside and clean them and also to stuff them with wonderful fall food combinations. (See photo above.) For a recent version, I substituted fresh mushrooms for chunks of bread and added some greens: Swiss chard plucked from a backyard garden covered by the season's first snow.  Along with the hot breakfast sausage links from Doug and Kim Wiley's Larga Vista Ranch (my favorite sausage in the world), chunks of cheese, onion, sage and parsley, it was simple, quick to assemble, and... magnificent!

Eat, Drink, Cook: Pumpkin Stuffed With Everything Good

From the first moment I stumbled across the recipe for Pumpkin Stuffed With Everything Good, I had to try it. I already had the perfect candidate: a beautiful little pie pumpkin I picked right from the vine at Venetucci Farm that I've been saving for something special.

One of the many things I love about Hethyr Pletsch, the personal chef who put on a holiday cooking class last weekend at Ranch Foods Direct, is her enthusiasm for ingredient substitution and experimentation. This is also true of Michele Mukatis, who taught a series of cooking classes this summer through her business Cultivate Health, and it's probably true of all foodies: part of the art of cooking is constantly improvising.

 

When I finally had a chance to try this recipe (an easily revisable mixture of meat, cheese, fruit and nuts roasted inside a pumpkin) I was improvising from the first. In the waning days of the farmers market when winter squash were plentiful, Smith Farms had an abundance of acorns in a glorious range of shapes and sizes. I chose one resembling a small pumpkin, thinking it would be great as a table decoration and then later for cooking. Over the weeks since, it even started turning orange. (Maybe the plant actually cross-pollinated with a pumpkin.) Anyway, it looked like it needed to be used up faster than the pumpkin, and it also had this perfect little stem on the top for a handle.

The results were beautiful and delicious. I had my moment of doubt first cutting into the squash (it's not easy to cut out the trap door on top and clean out the insides, but it is doable.) It also didn't take much more than an hour to bake (due to the fairly small size.) The spicy Italian sausage links from Ranch Foods Direct and the red wax-rind creamy melty Gouda cheese I used were excellent in it. (I didn't use bacon like the original recipe suggested, though I could have mixed it in. The sausage did seem to be a good choice.) I was reluctant at first to use bread in mine, so I included quartered fresh mushrooms as a filler. (Okay, I just happened to have day-old bread, so I did go ahead and use some of that too.) You could experiment with rice or a risotto pasta (I'm thinking about trying shredded cabbage) or go more in the direction of sweet (think dessert material) rather than savory (spectacular main dish.) But our savory version, with snipped fresh rosemary sprinkled in, was divine, a fun and flavorful one-dish meal (dish provided by nature).

After the two of us had dinner, we still had enough flesh left on the insides of the squash to scrape out and use later for a variation of curried pumpkin chicken chowder (a recipe from Hethyr Pletsch.)

At this time of year, a time for stuffing turkeys, I have to say it's almost as dramatic and satisfying to stuff a pumpkin to put in the middle of the table. And certainly, a possibility is to do both! Pumpkin Stuffed With Everything Good is as wonderful as it sounds.