Hi Wendy! I like your project. I love the fact that you live closeby. We should compare notes: there are lots of great growers up there…

Kate, how wonderful. Gosh, I’ve eaten breakfast but somehow this makes me starving. I am glad to learn your pumpkins are ripening in their windowsill…mine are ripening in the cold dark basement, go figure. Maybe I’ll move a couple upstairs into the light to see if it speeds up the process.

Stef, soup + cold weather = happiness, no?

Dennis, yeah, I do grow kabochas: I like them. I like their size (they ain’t huge, unlike many of my others) and their flesh is quite as you described, non-stringy, not needing much pulping. Weekend Farmer mentioned a curry dish with coconut milk and basil…doesn’t that sound divine?

Emily, a girl after my own heart: pasties! Now’s the time I actually get a craving. Hmm. Maybe this weekend, loads of cubed potatoes and carrots and some surprise meat from the freezer… But you got me with that crumble too. Wow! Oatmeal didn’t cut it for me this morning!

Andrea, I was threatened by my husband to not make too many sweet pumpkin dishes: moving into the indoor/sedentary season, you know…and hey what about just one more piece of pie… That pumpkin is on my list to grow next year! Thanks for reminding me!

Sylvie! You’re the one who inspired me, telling me about your pumpkin cake… Yeah we have trees. We’ve got about 5 on the property, 9 at the neighbor’s, and I planted another dozen, of which these Jonagolds are the measly harvest of maybe 10 apples. But ice cream. With our first snow here (!!) it’s somehow not so appealing.

John! Thanks for looking. That does sound really tasty: I wonder what kind of cheese, like a Gruyere? Or something more milky, like a ricotta? Either way…yum…warm toasty root veggies….

Now I want to try this with cubed pumpkin as part of the fruit “topping”… mmm…. with some homemade vanilla ice-cream, no?

Your Jonagold? I thought you had no fruit tree….

We have two squashloves around here: Squashycrumble – “pumpkin” pie filling topped with standard cobbler/crumble topping – and Pumpkin Pasties – like an apple turnover, but with slices of squash instead of apple.

Thanks for the reference to Ruhlman.

Try growing some Kabochas next year, we get ours from Johnny’s Select Seeds.

http://habeasbrulee.com/2006/10/20/kaddo-bourani-pumpkin-with-yogurt-and-meat-sauces/

This is *excellent* – better than it reads on paper, and you can cut the sugar listed in the recipe quite a bit. Just use enough to generously coat the slices of squash once you have them in the baking dish. I had this first at a restaurant and searched for the recipe fruitlessly for several years before finding it. The two different sauces really complement each other.

Enjoy your squash bounty!