“Sometimes I lie awake at
night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'. Then a voice says
to me,
'This is going to take more than one night.”
Charles M. Shulz
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| That voice has said the same thing to me on more than one occasion. |
 |
| he picked a pumpkin as the accessible holiday deity of the Peanuts universe. Perfect. |
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| they're really good at flying. |
That doesn't mean that it's impossible to walk with your punkin down the wrong culinary road. Which I did with Martha Stewart's recipe for Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good. The fact that there's just no way to stuff everything good into one pumpkin, even a great pumpkin, should have served as a sort of yellow light. True, I did Escherize it, just a little.
(Escherizing is a verb I just invented. It's the word that describes what happens when one takes an unsuspecting recipe, gives it a tweak here, a harmless substitution there, an addition in another place, puts it all in an, um, Escher cooker, and waits for either dinner or a dinner-flavored explosion. Like this:
What comes out is recognizable, yet a little strange. Sometimes weird and wonderful, and sometimes just weird.)
Only two tweaks were performed in the preparation of this dish.
I substituted cornbread for bread, and I substituted evaporated milk for cream. Neither one a bold, let alone outlandish substitution.
Here's the filling:
and the finished product:
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| which was yummy. |
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| which was not. |
I think it was my fault. That is, I think it would have been tastier with cream and regular bread. It's tempting to try again, this time adhering like a grass burr on corduroy to the recipe, but with so many wonderful winter squash recipes to play with before the season's over, why spend time working a recipe in the hope that it may reach the point of 'not too bad'?
Why not instead play another round with a recipe that turned out to be great?
Like the Squash enchiladas with tomatillo sauce. Instead of baking and mashing the squash, I used cubes of a Queensland blue that had been pan roasted as a side dish a couple of nights before. Here's the finished product:
A super recipe that made a great weeknight meatless main, but would do just as wonderfully at an autumn brunch, or topped with a poached egg and avocado for a super awesome weekend breakfast.
As one would suspect, the effort of rolling them into actual enchiladas was wasted; everything melted together under a blanket of salsa and cheese. Next time, it'll go into the pan in casserole style layers and be even easier.
And yes, the tomatillo salsa did get a try. Because I'd never even bought any and I thought them irresistibly beautiful and interesting.
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| Like edible little paper lanterns. |
That, my friends, was a very good salsa. Not quite as addictive as Pioneer Woman's restaurant style salsa, and really, a nice jar of salsa (red or green), or a can of enchilada sauce would've been just as tasty and reduced prep time to race track fast.
A couple of raids on our local pumpkin patch netted this booty-
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| Is it autumnal decor, or a pantry annex? Both! |
which I'll be using at least once a week, living high on the pumpkin til the season is over and the stockpile depleted. Because expecting to cook with anything besides an imported butternut or acorn squash after Halloween is a little like walking into a January orchard, giving a tree a hearty slap on the bark and saying, "sure it's winter, sure you worked hard all summer, but you've been dormant for months now! Suck it up and
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| get over it, peaches! Let's see some fruit!" |
I hope, that whatever season is controlling your interior weather
is treating you kindly.
That you're able to give yourself the time you need
to harvest, or plant, or grow, or rest.
And that if (or when) you ask your nighttime ceiling
where you went wrong in the doing of those things,
the dead of night voice gives you an answer
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| that brings you peace and rest. |
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