Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published October 31, 2007 What Do We Do With All This Pumpkin? Well? If you carved a jack-o-lantern out of a real pumpkin, you discovered several things: 1. These kits that allow you to make intricately-detailed carvings that look laser-cut were impressive a few years ago, but now that everybody has them it's probably time to go back to the traditional grinning, gap-toothed ghoul. 2. The vogue is to carve the eyes and mouth not out of the side of the pumpkin, but the top, thereby making the stem become the nose. 3. No matter how charming the idea, toasted pumpkin seeds are a marginal taste treat at best. 4. If you carve a pumpkin even a few days before Halloween, it will mold and rot. (The one we did for a Scout function a week earlier had liquefied by Halloween.) 5. There are all these nice cheap pumpkins around, and the temptation is to buy them and do something with them. I have bad news. I should have known better, but a few years ago I loaded up on pumpkins with the idea of making pies for Thanksgiving. (As long as you don't carve them, they don't usually go bad.) But that kind of pumpkin is no good for pies. Not unless you want to add a ton of molasses or brown sugar to make them sweet. There's a special kind of pumpkin--not often seen down here--that is raised specifically to be packed into cans and then into pumpkin pies. Unless you can find one of those, you're much better off buying the canned stuff--as anti-intuitive as that may sound. But what about all those non-sweet pumpkins? Surely they can be used for something. A couple of years ago I decided to start treating pumpkin like potato, and I've had good luck with that. My first attempt was to make a version of potatoes au gratin using both pumpkin and sweet potatoes. It came out pretty good, except for the sweet potato part. Now I just make it with pumpkin. I also sliced the pumpkin meat up into sticks and fried them. Pumpkin French fries are a little strange but not bad--if you can get over your French-fry addiction's disappointment that they're not potatoes. I had less luck making mashed pumpkin in the same style as mashed potatoes. It seemed to get glutenous, and the taste wasn't good enough to make me want to get past the texture. But my favorite of all is pumpkin ravioli. If you want to go crazy with this, you can puree the pumpkin and work it into your fresh pasta dough, but there's no reason you have to go that far. (Ravioli is, however, one of the easiest and best things you can make with that pasta machine you never use.) To do that, you start out by thinking of the pumpkin not as a potato, but as something like a squash (which, in fact, it is). Cook it with butter, garlic, a little ham, and herbs, puree it, and there you are. The sauce is a standard alfredo sauce. I guess I'd better write all this down, right? (See recipe below.) © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com