Getting Carried Away....
My friend Suzie was visiting this past weekend, so I took her to see our colourful local market with its abundance of fall produce. Rejoicing over the bounty of the harvest, I proceeded to load up on way, way too many vegetables. Our last stop was at the stall of an organic farmer who frequently arrives at the market in the fall with a cartload of (incredibly interesting) designer pumpkins, squashes and gourds. Having already purchased a perfectly acceptable Halloween pumpkin at Loblaws for $2.50, I'd pretty much convinced myself that additional pumpkin purchases were both unnecessary and wasteful. That was before I spied a large, squat, green and orange specimen sitting on the ground beside the cart, looking for all the world like Cinderella's carriage, and topped with a perfectly twisted, 'artisanal' stem. With elbows out and adrenaline surging, I ran to grab the pumpkin and hoisted it to my chest by the fragile stem. Clearly under unreasonable strain, the stem promptly broke, allowing 300 pounds, or so, of vegetable matter to free fall to the cement. Remarkably, the pumpkin remained largely intact with only a couple of splits in its taut skin. (In retrospect, I realized that the flesh was about 6 inches thick all 'round and that it would've taken a jack hammer to cause any real damage). The owner of the pumpkin, who had carefully watched these antics, sauntered toward me. Recognizing an idiot when he saw one, the farmer informed me of the rarity of the vegetable genre. That's a "Russian fairy tale pumpkin de Provence" he mumbled, looking me straight in the eye. It sounded something like that, at any rate. After a brief lecture on never lifting a pumpkin by its stem, he suggested crazy glue for easy repair, then charged me $10. He offered to keep the brutish vegetable at his stall until I could drive by with my car to pick it up, however, I was so mortified by the whole encounter that I could hardly wait to take off. I therefore refused his kind offer and struggled, hump-backed with pumpkin in arms, over the 200 yards to my parked vehicle. Thank God for strength training.
When I finally got the pumpkin home, ( and
realized that I didn't own crazy glue), I began to view it in a less
illustrious light and so decided to pop the thing in the oven. Five hours later
it was cooked. As a result, I have enough pumpkin in my freezer to feed a small
village until well into next year. What can I say, I'm a sucker for foodstuff that
is either really big or really small and has the word miniature, Mennonite,
maple, fairy-tale or Provence in its name. For example, I frequently buy
sweet-looking miniature aubergines. Since I don't know what to do with them, I
keep them in my fridge until they rot, then put them in my green bin for
composting.
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| Pumpkin in the oven. I know that it looks like I'm baking a troll's bottom, but I really wasn't. My cell phone camera distorts things. |
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Later that same day....with new footwear and feeling like Cinderella.
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