have your jack o'lantern and eat it, too

so these are the pumpkins maggie and i carved for halloween this year. normally, halloween is a kind of symbol to me of how decadent we've let ourselves be in this culture - taking a perfectly good piece of food, cutting it up, and displaying it in front of your house, for all the world to see it rot. scary, indeed.


but there's no reason you need to just let 'em go to waste! we were able to cook every part of these pumpkins that we normally would (roasted the seeds, cooked every piece of the flesh), and join in on a fun carving tradition. with just these pumpkins (ok, and a little more donated from cutouts from other friends' creations), we made a pumpkin-quinoa risotto, have a quart of roasted pumpkin puree in the freezer, and made over 11 pints of tasty, tasty, pumpkin butter.

pumpkin butter recipe (adapted from allrecipes):

INGREDIENTS

• 4 cups pumpkin puree
• 3/4 cup apple juice (we used local cider)
  
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• a healthy splash of maple syrup
  
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• a squeeze of lemon
  

DIRECTIONS

1. combine pumpkin, apple juice, spices, syrup, and sugar in a large saucepan; stir well. bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes or until thickened. stir frequently, or else lava-hot spurts of pumpkin will shoot out of the pot and all over you and your kitchen.
   
2. transfer to sterile containers and chill in the refrigerator until serving.

you are getting sleepy...

ingredients:
1 local chioggia beet, cut into discs
1 digital camera
a pinch of extra time

quince-anera

no, i'm not talking about latin american coming-of-age parties. i'm talkin' 'bout quince, the winter-hardy almost-an-apple, not-quite-a-pear that Pliny the Elder liked to eat raw.


maggie has been doing some work with a friend of ours who's a landscaper/gardener, and one of the benefits is that we get to eat things that the clients don't want. these have included sorrel, lamb's quarters, oregano, nasturtiums, and now, quince. she came home the other day with about 15 quinces (yes, that's quince quinces for the spanish speakers) that had fallen on the ground, and instantly we knew what to do: quince butter.

we got out our copy of putting food by, chopped up the quince, heated 'em for a while, then ran 'em through the old-timey food mill we borrowed from our friends down the street. boil a lot more, add a couple spices, and you've got thick, thick butter (ours is almost like a paste). and water vapor clinging to all of your walls.

specific recipe comin' soon...

next year in jerusalem (artichokes)

ahh, the sunchoke. long regarded by maggie and i as an excellent root vegetable, to be bought on rare occasions in small amounts when it was available at our local co-op (by "local" i mean a 45-minute drive away, the nearest co-op since Whole Foods bought out the one in Portland). but this year, i bought a pound of waldspinel (austrian-german for "gem of the woods") sunchokes at the fedco tree sale.

so far, they've proven to be the best and most rewarding thing to come out of our garden. i've only harvested a handful, for one meal, but it was so satifsfying to dig into the soil and pluck out these juicy red beauties.

cooking note: we harvested these really as early as you should - they were quite delicate and got too soft with very little cooking (we roasted 'em). really, we should let them overwinter underground, but we won't be here once the ground unfreezes, so we have to get 'em while we can. when they're young, seems best to 'eat 'em raw.