Theo vs Pumpkin

It wasn’t just any pumpkin. It was the heaviest, ugliest, most enormous, bulgy, orange horror show since America’s incumbent President. If we’d bought it at the farm shop next to my house back at home, we’d probably have walked away with a bill in the quadruple figures. Max and I had to cut the thing into four just to fit it into the family sized fridge/cupboard, where it took up every inch of space, forcing me to down the entire two litre carton of multifruit juice that I’d just bought. That multifruit juice was meant for breakfasts. It was one step too far. This meant war.

I set myself the challenge of using the whole pumpkin in meals that week, and suddenly all hope of getting any work done over the next five days vanished before my eyes. Max suggested starting with a pumpkin kasha. Kasha is porridge. Normally we make it with buckwheat, but this time we experimented and tried wheat. Wheat porridge with bits of pumpkin in it. And, at Max’s insistence, a generous portion of sugar. Turns out, that’s not a great recipe – maybe don’t try it at home. I also had a stab at pumpkin soup. Not having a blender or any stock, Max and I had to improvise quite a lot on this one. I bought some ‘soup flavouring mix’ and added some salt. If I’d looked at the soup flavouring mix, I’d have noticed that it consisted mainly of salt. To get rid of the fibrous pulp which was still lurking at the bottom of the pan (for want of a blender), we decided to use a sieve. So, after hours of slicing, roasting, and boiling, we ended up with what was, to all intents and purposes, very salty water. Hooray!

The next day, I woke up with a renewed desire to get rid of that pumpkin, which we’d only managed to use about a twentieth of in the kasha, the taste of which was still lingering in my mouth like a taunt from the pumpkin. When I searched ‘pumpkin recipes’, the first thing to come up (other than salads which are clearly a no-no), was pumpkin pancakes. I mean OBVIOUSLY. Couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of pumpkin pancakes earlier!(?) So I fell on the next eight of the Halloween monstrosity which, in true monster style, was sticking around waaay longer than it was welcome. Carefully collecting the seeds to toast later, I roasted the flesh, blended it, and combined it with a generous portion of pancake batter. Considering this was the first time I’d made American pancakes, I think it went really well. They were tasty (at least I think they were, it was hard to tell over the ocean of butter and honey I slathered them with), they looked healthy (in fact they kind of glowed orange, which has to be a good thing, right?), and their consistency was unpleasant but edible. I’m convinced the addition of pumpkin actually succeeded in making the pancakes worse, but at least it helped me tackle some more pumpkin, so I’ll roll with it.

Next up: pumpkin pie. Having never made this particular delicacy, and lacking about two thirds of the ingredients specified by the recipe, I assumed this would go swimmingly. Well, the good news is that it takes up a heck of a lot of pumpkin. I’d say we got through about a sixth or a quarter of the thing in one fell swoop. The bad news is that I took the term ‘swimmingly’ at face value, and contrived to turn the pie filling into a liquid. It was more like pumpkin soup in a pie crust. I baked it for an hour longer than I was meant to, and by the time it had cooled, it finally looked vaguely solid. It was the most successful pumpkin recipe by far and away. It had a nice mix of spices and a heap of sugar, so it actually tasted a little bit Christmassy (Americans will say this is wrong and it tastes Thanksgivingey… nice try Americans, but nutmeg and cinnamon have already been bagsied by Christmas).

Max was getting desperate to finish the pumpkin at this point, and had taken to hacking off chunks of it and eating them raw whenever he was in the kitchen. In the interests of Max’s health and sanity, I did the noble thing, and made two more pumpkin pies, which were slightly worse than the first one but still very tasty. In fact, Max did actually get ill later in the week… (*coughcoughdon’teatrawpumpkincough*).

After all this, we were still left with a huge plate of toasted pumpkin seeds and one small jug of blended roasted pumpkin flesh, which still seems to leer at me from inside the fridge every day. The battle continues.