Pumpkin tales

You've heard the old joke that the definition of eternity is two people and a ham.  But we're currently in an even longer age with two people and a pumpkin.

My friend bought a huge pale blue pumpkin several weeks ago and after a couple of big meals from it, decided it was going to be too much for the two of them.  She gave me about a quarter of it, which was a really big hunk.  I didn't think to take a picture of the original gift, but here's how it looked later -- beautiful pale bluish-greenish-gray on the outside, big thick bright orange meat on the inside.

I've served plenty of pumpkin in the past from cans, and not just in pie.  And I've made plenty of winter squash of other varieties, but never a big pumpkin like this.  It has been a challenge to come up with new ways to fix it.

Here is it in soup.  Very pretty against the red beans, and just enough taste of its own.

Here it is in pasta, along with cauliflower and black olives.  The combination was surprisingly good for a miscellaneous meal.

I had the oven on to heat up the crab cakes, so I put some pumpkin in too.

Here's another time when I stuck the pumpkin in the oven, but not long enough.  When it was time to serve, I had to turn on the broiler for a few minutes.

When I'm making rice I'll put some pumpkin slices in the steamer basket above the rice cooker.  If the slices are somewhere between a quarter- and half-inch thick, they are done in about 15 minutes, just as the cooker turns itself off.  (With brown rice, wait and put the pumpkin in a half hour after the cooker has started.)

A month after its arrival, one end of the pumpkin was getting a touch of mold so last night I carved off and threw out a big chunk.  But I figure we still have at least two meals left.  Eternity may be finally reaching its end.

Comfort food

High on my list of comfort foods is bread and gravy.  When we had it as a kid there was probably Wonder Bread underneath, but now that I am a grownup food sophisticate I have upgraded to Wonder-Bread-or-anything-else-on-hand.

My mother used to serve my sister and me plates of bread and gravy with the huge enthusiasm of Tom Sawyer inducing suckers to paint the fence.  "We're having such a treat tonight!" she would gush, and we believed it.

In truth, this was probably the cheapest meal she could think of to put on the table during some dark days when my dad was out of work.  I suppose there had to have been a little meat in the house at a previous point, else where would the gravy have come from, but it didn't appear on our plates, nor did we care.

Many decades after I figured it out, I still love bread and gravy.  Stuff from the bottom of the pot roast pan, like today, is great.  Leftover gravy from Thanksgiving dinner is even better.  If there's some meat on the plate too that's fine, but hardly necessary for me to feel comforted.

Say no to Papa

There's a Papa John's pizza store at the end of our street, and we've been patronizing it for years.  The last time was about three weeks ago -- and when I say the last time, I mean it.

Papa John himself, John Schnatter, hates the Affordable Care Act.  He said earlier this year that providing healthcare for workers would add as much as 14 cents to the cost of a pizza.  Many customers opined that they'd be happy to pay it.  This week, now that the election makes implemention of the law a certainty, Papa came back with a new argument: it's likely that fulltime employees will have their hours cut below 30 so they won't have to be covered.

Papa says it will cost as much as $8 million a year to comply with the new law.  To put that in context, the company had revenue of $1.2 billion last year, and net income of $55 million.  John Schnatter's total compensation last year was $2.7 million and his net worth is estimated at slightly under $300 million.  The company is giving away 2 million free pizzas this fall as part of a football promotion.

There's not much I can do to persuade a captain of industry to behave more like a mensch.  I could point out that healthy employees are an asset to a company, particularly one in the food service business (who wants sputum with their pepperoni?).  I could point out that the US has been the only major nation in the world without some kind of universal health care system.  But those arguments probably aren't going to make much of a dent in Papa John's cranium.

What I can do is buy pizza from somebody else.  Which I, and many of my friends, have resolved to do.

Dumb ideas in marketing

With much hoopla, our local grocery store has turned its cheese counter into an exclusive outlet for a branded dealer.  I'm pessimistic, having lived through a similar "upgrade" of our deli counter, in which suddenly we could only buy brand-name pastrami, at $2 a pound more than the old no-name store meat. But this morning I had my first up-close-and-personal contact with the new brand.

Last week my husband bought me some havarti cheese, one of my favorites, and this morning I decided to have some for breakfast.  But when I took the new package out of the fridge I was momentarily appalled.

"What -- you bought me cheese that's pervasive, stinky and lingering????" I shrieked.

But on closer examination I realized that some marketing genius had decided to festoon the labels with every conceivable adjective that could be applied to cheese.

 

It might be a good marketing ploy to label your cheese with an accurate description, especially if you're trying to tempt buyers into trying something new.  But it strikes me as dumb to label your cheese as everything.  I suspect a lot of buyers will -- just as I did -- spy one or two of the adjectives on the label and quickly decide it's not for them.

Meanwhile, the havarti wasn't even as good as the (cheaper) stuff we used to get at the same cheese counter.  I ate it anyway, but will not be returning to the fancy new cheese counter with much enthusiasm.

Thinking out of the box

When I was a kid, making things out of boxes was a mainstay of our household cooking repertoire.  Don't think I ever baked a cake that didn't start in a box (I'd say that continues to this very day, except that I've given up either eating or baking cake).  Bisquick, of course.  Rice-A-Roni (I still cook that, or its virtual equivalent, except that I learned long ago to do it from scratch).

As I became a more sophisticated cook and a more suspicious and demanding consumer, I gave up practically everything in boxes.  Except for one, which I couldn't live without -- Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. It's a small box; two of us usually eat a little more than half a batch, leaving just enough for somebody's breakfast.  It cooks up quickly, 20 minutes in the oven.






















It is the perfect complement to chili or bean soup, which appear frequently on our menus.  And did I mention that it's delicious?

In the early postwar days, when cake mixes and similar "labor-saving" products first appeared, they were formulated so you just added water.  But then some marketing genius determined that women didn't want to just add water -- that made them feel useless and uncreative.  But if they had to add milk and an egg, they retained their feminine mystique of being good cooks.  (The next thing you knew, we had pudding cake!)

And so Jiffy still requires milk and an egg.  Which I am happy to supply.  I make it as corn bread rather than muffins -- easier to fix, easier to clean up.  In my nine-inch square pyrex pan, the bread is about five-eighths of an inch tall, just like a garment seam allowance.

I know I could make cornbread from scratch, and perhaps it would be one percent better than Jiffy.  But it would take five minutes longer.  So I continue with my obeisance to the 1950s.

The end of summer

I'm a cold weather girl, coming off a really nasty summer (we had ten days over 100 degrees and 50 more over 90) so I'm rooting for the heat to break.  It's been in the 80s most of this week, but the cold front is due to come through tonight, and they're talking about frost and other wintry weather stuff.  So it seemed like a good day to close down many aspects of our summer way of life (and not a minute too soon in my opinion).

The farmer picked what was left of the basil, and it will probably become pesto tomorrow.  He picked blossoms and leaves from the nasturtiums for our salad tonight.

And we had one last dinner on our screened-in porch.  Our porch is one of those fancies that is glorious when the moment is right, and kind of superfluous all the rest of the time.  Unfortunately we haven't had too many right moments this year; even with a ceiling fan it's been way too hot to eat outside for most of the summer.  Tomorrow it will probably be too late.  But tonight it was beautiful,

In the (salmon) pink

I remember to the day(s) when salmon became a staple of our family diet.  It was July of 1980, and we visited my sister-in-law in Alaska.  One day she bought salmon for dinner, and showed me how to cook it (a film of mayonnaise over the top so it wouldn't dry out under the broiler).  This was a new concept to me -- I'd never seen salmon in our grocery stores, and had eaten it only in restaurants.

The salmon was wonderful, of course, fabulously fresh, only a few miles from its fishing grounds.  It was expensive but worth it.  We had it a couple of times during our visit.

When we came home to the landlocked Midwest, we stopped at the grocery on our way from the airport and to my amazement found gorgeous salmon at the fish counter -- at half the price we'd paid in Anchorage!  

Seems that the fishing season had gotten delayed by some ugly disagreement between fishermen and government, and now there was such a backlog of fish in the big salmon ports that airplanes were taking off every three minutes, 24/7.  You could barely give away the fish, hence our bonanza at Kroger; apparently even stores that had never carried it before couldn't refuse.  And it must have been popular, because it's been there ever since.

We bought and ate lots of salmon for the rest of that summer, and forevermore.  I've learned to prepare salmon in many different ways -- broiled, pan-sauteed, baked -- and with many different flavor accents.  But in recent years I've become far more picky about the variety and provenance of my salmon.

We try not to buy farm-raised salmon; it tastes bland and insipid, and we worry about the potential for environmental degradation from the farm pens, not to mention the potential for disease in the closely crammed fish population.  But this year we've been blessed with what seems to be a bumper crop of wild-caught sockeye, more delicious than we remember from previous years.  

I don't know where they come from -- probably Alaska -- or how long we'll enjoy this season's catch.  But we're loving it while it lasts.