I always eat my jack o' lantern. Jack pumpkin is cheap per-pound, but grainy and bland compared to food-meant squash, so the uninitiated are often counselled to eat one of those instead and throw Smilin' Jack on the compost.
But ingratitude to that degree my Scottish soul hard abides. Indeed, I've been known to buy several of these giant gourds and carve just one, keeping the others in a cool dark dry place for the months beyond.
The trick to making meat of this vegetable is knowing how to draw out its qualities, and/or to use it in robust dishes where its colour, texture, and restrained sweetness add value.
Which is why I appealed to India for help.
The following simple and quick recipe coalesced in my kitchen about 25 years ago. It's a hearty and healthy Punjabi approach, vegan in its native form, with a widely available North American masala, and I look forward to it all year. (Note that I forgot to scatter the peanuts on this one before I took the photos.)
Curried jack can be served alone as a side dish or over rava, rice, or diced potatoes for a main course. Don't skimp on the spices; too much is enough. Also, I'm fairly spicy for a white guy, so if you aren't, go easy on the jalapeño, black pepper, and ginger.
Finally, like all highly-flavoured dishes, this one is markedly better the next day or later. I seldom get my act together effectively enough to make tomorrow's supper today, but if you're having guests or carrying to a potluck, this is the master stroke. Any road, the unlikely leftovers will be incandescent at next day's lunch.
CURRIED JACK
Serves 2-4 as a main dish, up to 8 as a side.
Ingredients in order:
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper
1 teaspoon powdered turmeric
1 teaspoon whole brown mustard seed, or substitute yellow
1 tablespoon neutral vegetable oil or ghee
1 clove minced or pressed garlic
1/4 to 1/2 cup chopped onion
10 jarred jalapeño rings, or 5-7 fresh, chopped fine
1 1/2 teaspoon grated fresh gingerroot
3 pints peeled and roughly diced pumpkin
1 16-ounce can of diced tomatoes
1 large bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon ground thyme
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 cup sliced celery, chopped cabbage, or frozen peas
1/2 cup peanuts (or substitute cooked pulses or meat at the appropriate time)
Rava, rice, or diced potatoes for bedding.
Take a large saucepan or skillet with tight-fitting lid and chafe it over low heat until evenly warmed.
Add the ground cumin, fresh-ground black pepper, powdered turmeric, and whole mustard seed. Move gently with the edge of a spatula until spices are lightly toasted and fragrant, about a minute.
Add the vegetable oil or ghee and stir in the spices to blend.
Add the minced garlic, chopped onion, and grated gingerroot and stir them into the masala mixture.
When the garlic and onion have softened and become translucent, add the diced pumpkin and turn carefully and well to fully distribute the spice mixture.
Turn the heat up to medium and add the canned tomatoes, ground thyme, and lemon juice, turning again to integrate. Don't worry that the tomatoes don't seem to moisten things much; the next step will take care of that.
Add the bay leaf and seal the whole under the lid, 5 to 10 minutes. Shake often to heat evenly and prevent scorching.
When the pumpkin has raised steam, add the green vegetable, lower the heat to medium-low and turn the lot well.
Fit the lid again and allow to simmer until the pumpkin is completely tender and translucent, about 20 minutes, turning from time to time.
Scatter the peanuts over the top and serve over rava, rice, or diced potatoes, if a main course.
Family mostly gone. Friends busy with their own.
I never found a home in humanity. So here I sit.
There's a certain irony. I was always the Yuletide warrior: the guy who spent the year sourcing gifts, and immediately on first December, sent cards, decked halls, logged kitchen hours, all while listening to holiday music, alternating between seasonal radio and my ever-expanding battery of Christmas albums.
Who knew the holidays were yet another thing you eventually don't qualify for if you're not married?
I'm told there's an entire nation of us, we solitaries. Though we mostly don't know each other. Isolation is best performed alone.
But fear not. This isn't another treatise on the maudlin holiday of the outlier.
Because I've come to spread the good news of Zen.
I've said it before: Zen practice doesn't end suffering. It just helps you suffer better.
A fact of which I'm well-reminded in December.
Sure, I'd love to have a warm home full of love and children. Somebody to give to. Somebody to share with.
But I can always cherish the desire itself. In spite of our Western thoughtways – our conviction that life has a scoreboard, marking each passing second "earned" or "unearned" – just the belief in Christmas is joy enough.
There's also something to be said for standing outside of a thing to fully see into it. Clear-seeing is harder to pull off from too close.
As my world has shrunk to a room, I've gained a great deal of pleasure in this season. All that's going on around me. The responses that weather and light and sights and smells elicit. The memories, and yes, even the unrealised dreams.
They were good dreams. And I'm grateful that my society maintains this calendar month of sesshin to remind us of such things.
It's important to affirm that our insistence on separating people into winners and losers is delusion.
So this Christmas, as in the past, I'm once again listening to my Christmas radio playlist – over thirty holiday stations worldwide. And if it's hard to get too excited about baking for just myself, I've still got chai and sourdough coffee cake, and pumpkin soup for Christmas Eve, and hoppin' john on New Year's.
And I'll get to have Christmas dinner with my sister and her family. If my circle has dwindled to little more at this stage, it's also true that I look forward to that all year.
And the knowledge that even that isn't guaranteed, in this world of dew, keeps me treasuring it.
So once again I'll sit through midnight on New Year's Eve, holding mudra, minding my posture, and smiling inwardly as the fireworks drive this year out, never to be seen again.
And into that vacuum will immediately tumble… something else.
Creation is infinite. And I am small.
A heartfelt Merry Christmas to all my brothers and sisters. And if that's foreign to your practice, then at minimum, a deep December full of cheer and contemplation.
PS: If you've yet to discover Internet radio, and would like a taste, Christmas Radio Malta is one of my favourites. Their website player is dead, but you can click here on their stream URL to open it in your browser, or paste it into your media player.
I'm listening to it now.
(Photo of the Jellyfish Galaxy [ESO 137-001] and surrounding space courtesy of NASA and Wikipedia Commons.)
Here we are at the holidays again, for some reason, which means that many of us will soon confront daunting quantities of leftover turkey. (Not so fast, vegans. Keep reading.)
You know who the all-time leftover turkey champions are? The Aztecs. Which is no great surprise when you figure they invented turkeys.
So this year I thought I'd share one of my favourite recipes. Its lineage goes straight back to the First Nations of Mexico, and uncoincidentally it's one of the best leftover turkey dishes ever devised. This stew is in fact so good you may find yourself unenthusiastically masticating that first-run serving, unfavourably comparing its drab, insipid presentation to the feast you will soon make from its scraps.
And the awesomeness of Mexican Hominy Stew doesn't stop there. Because this is mom's-kitchen fare, you can make it with just about any meat, or even (here it comes, vegans) no meat at all. (See after-recipe comments for Quick and Deadly Vegan Hack.) In fact, most ingredients can be swapped and subbed as necessary, resulting in full-spectrum dining dominance for this delicious comfort food.
MEXICAN HOMINY STEW
For 6:
2 rashers of bacon
1 good nopal, sliced (substitutes: chopped green bell pepper or cabbage; whole green beans; sliced celery; cubed pumpkin)
1 medium-sized yellow onion, sliced in wedges
1 fresh or jarred jalapeño, chopped well
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
two 16-ounce cans of diced tomatoes, or equivalent fresh, chopped
1 16-ounce can of hominy, drained (substitute: sweet corn or diced potatoes)
1 quart of chicken or vegetable stock
2 teaspoons of ground cumin
1 drop of liquid smoke, optional
1/2 teaspoon of thyme
1 large bay leaf
1 dried pepper, roasted (substitutes: 1 tablespoon smoked paprika, or ordinary paprika, toasted)
tomato juice or water
2 cups of roasted turkey, shredded (substitutes: cooked chicken, pork, beef, lamb, mutton, goat, sausage, hamburger; raw meaty white fish or shellfish; cooked beans)
lime juice
1/3 cup culantro, chopped (substitutes: cilantro, Italian parsley, celery leaves)
optional: queso Cotija, crumbled
1. Toast the dried pepper over medium heat in a dry skillet, turning frequently, till dark and crisp. Remove it from the pan and set it aside to cool. (Pepper will crisp even more as it cools.)
2. Medium-fry the bacon in a Dutch oven or similar. Remove, chop coarsely, and set aside. Pour the fat out of the pan.
3. In the residual fat left in the bottom of the pan, toss the onion wedges, crushed garlic, jalapeño, nopal, and cumin until the onion begins to turn translucent, about 5 minutes.
4. Add the thyme, bay leaf, tomatoes, hominy, liquid smoke, and stock. If adding soaked but uncooked beans, add them here as well.
5. Crush the roasted pepper as thoroughly as possible and add. (Shake out seeds first if desired.)
6. Add enough tomato juice or water to achieve stew-friendly liquidity.
7. Cover, bring to a boil, and reduce to simmer. Cook until the vegetables (and any soaked beans) become tender, about 30-40 minutes.
8. Add the turkey, bacon, and cilantro and cook till just heated through.
9. Sprinkle with lime juice, ladle into bowls, and crumble queso Cotija on top if desired.
Serve with hermit bread or sourdough corn bread (recipe pending).
NOTES:
- Quick and Deadly Vegan Hack: 1) sauté onion and nopalitos in a film of olive oil; 2) use vegetable stock instead of chicken; 3) replace meat with beans (black are especially good). So conventionally delicious you can serve it to meat-eaters and they'll never know it's vegan.
- If you let this stew sit for a day or two in the refrigerator before reheating and serving, it tastes even better. (Gives the flavours more time to mingle.)
- Don't overcook the meat after adding it; bacon in particular quickly turns to tofu if simmered too long.
- The recipe above is to my taste, which means it's pretty lively. I back off on the peppers when serving guests. In any case, know your dried peppers; some are hotter than others. Back off a bit when adding fish or shellfish, too; too much vegetable fire overwhelms seafood.
- Toast paprika by tossing it in a hot, dry skillet till dark.
- Cilantro is a chemically complex herb that tastes like soap to some DNA profiles. Unless you know that guests are in a non-soap population, it's best to avoid serving cilantro.
- Omit the cumin, thyme, liquid smoke, lime, and cheese – the peripherals, what – and you got the exact same recipe the Aztecs ate. Tell me that ain't awesome.
Roasting the pepper
(Saw these in town the other day. Turn 'em upside down, you got a monastery's-worth of cheap zafus.)
October is an odd time in North America: for these thirty-one days, you can buy a pumpkin here. Any other time, you get: "What, are you crazy?" (One of us must be.)
And it only gets weirder: virtually none of the pumpkins Canucks and Yanks buy by the metric tonne this month will be eaten. Come All Saints Day, they will be thrown in the garbage. Even the thousands that were never cut.
Why are overseas readers now aghast? Because on all other continents, people know pumpkin for excellent food. One of the most versatile vegetables on earth, useful in every course of a meal, it's both delicious and nutritious. I've no idea why North Americans have demoted it to a gourd, but if it weren't for that Druid holiday we dug up and transplanted across the sea, this First Nations masterpiece (utterly unknown to the Druids) would have gone extinct here a century ago. If the irony gets any thicker, we can carve our jack o' lanterns out of that instead.
Or you can; I pickle mine. Pickles – a staple of Japanese monasteries – anchor the flavour plates I build for sesshins. (It's an ancient Zen art intended to pique mindfulness with a shotgun blast to the senses). And the pumpkin ones are my favourite: marrowy, neon orange, and sweet spicy-sour, with just a hint of musky bitterness from the lime.
The recipe:
PUMPKIN SESSHIN PICKLES
(Makes about 3 1/2 pints. Note that after step 3, you will have to wait 24 hours before continuing.)
7 cups raw pumpkin, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
2 sticks cinnamon, shredded
2 1/3 cups cider vinegar
2 1/3 cups sugar
15 whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon whole black pepper corns
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons whole allspice
1 tablespoon whole coriander seeds
2 inches gingerroot, sliced thin
lime slices, 1/4 inch thick, one per jar
dried cranberries ("craisins")
canning jars and lids
1. Cover the pumpkin cubes with water, bring to a boil, reduce heat, and lightly blanch, about 10 minutes. (Not longer; they'll cook another three times before you're done.) Drain immediately to avoid overcooking.
2. Put all other ingredients except lime slices and cranberries in a large pot and bring to a boil. (Warning: hot syrup boils over very quickly; stay present and alert.) Turn heat down to lowest setting, cover the pot, and simmer for 15 minutes.
3. Add the pumpkin cubes and bring back to a boil. Then cover the pot, lower heat, and simmer for 3 minutes. Afterward, remove the pot from the burner and set it aside for 24 hours.
4.Next day: Sterilise jars in a water bath canner. Heat the pumpkin and syrup mixture to boiling, then lower heat and simmer for 5 minutes.
5. Remove the jars one at a time from the hot water, drop in four to five cranberries, and ladle in hot pickles to 1/2 inch from the rim. Be sure to include spices.
6. Slide a lime slice between the pickles and the jar's side, fit a sterilised lid, screw the band down tight, and return the sealed jar to the water bath. Repeat until all the pickles are packed.
7. Turn up the heat under the canner and process (cook) the jars for an additional 5 minutes after the water has returned to a boil.
10. Remove the jars from the water and allow them to cool naturally until the lids pop. Store in a cool dark place for at least a month before opening. (Any that don't pop should be stored in the fridge and eaten first.)
Specific points on pickling jack o' lanterns:
To insure fresh pickle stock, carve your jack o' lantern on Hallowe'en and refrigerate the scraps; if you light it with a candle, line the lid with aluminium foil. Make your pickles next day, peeling off any soot or scorched flesh with a vegetable peeler. Later, when you eat them, you'll recognise bits of eye and teeth on your plate.
Walking the beach after a fierce NNW, I found this small Japanese squash, washed up generally intact on the tide line. It's about the size of a large grapefruit.
It was delicious. A little salty. But worth the walk.
Blessed be the sea, that gives as good as she gets.
