Working with Pumpkins

I love pumpkin. A lot of people don't really think about it, until they get to the pumpkin pie for dessert on Thanksgiving. And a lot of people just plain hate it. Me, I love it. For me, there's never a bad time of year to eat pumpkin pie, or anything else made from pumpkin for that matter. It's such a versatile ingredient. In addition to the standard pumpkin roll, bread and of course pie, I've also seen pumpkin soup, tempura, flan, cheesecake, muffins, pancakes and even lasagna. So I decided that before it goes out of season, I'd better get down to cooking some pumpkin.

Before we get started, let's talk about the three main types of pumpkin that you're likely to see at the store. You've got the big ones, the really little ones and the inbetween ones.



You never see the big ones used for anything but Jack-o-lanterns. That's probably at least partly because the smaller a pumpkin is (or so I've heard), the sweeter and more flavorful it is. Yes, that means the smaller ones are the sweetest. But alas, they are pretty small. That leaves us with the inbetween ones, called pie pumpkins, or sugar pumpkins.

I started my adventure with a pretty average-size sugar pumpkin. First step: whack off the top! While you're at it, go ahead and whack off the bottom too. Be careful! Pumpkin is softer than some other squash, but that doesn't mean it's like butter. I just laid mine out on its side the cutting board, and sliced off the ends with a sharp kitchen knife. This was not a scene from Psycho, and I didn't look like some crazed butcher hacking away with a cleaver. Just go easy, making a nice, clean, safe cut with a sharp kitchen knife.



Now, with both the ends removed, go ahead and scoop out the guts into a bowl. Don't throw them away! Roasted pumpkin seeds are good snackin'! We'll get to that in a moment. We still have a lot of them to scoop out. You can use a good spoon or even an ice cream scoop to get that squash clean. Make sure you get as much of that fibrous gunk out as possible. I'm sure it's good for something, but you don't really want it where we're going. I even went so far as to cut my pumpkin in half to make sure I got it all. Since there's a nice stable base on both the top and bottom now, it's a pretty safe cut. Now you need to get that stuff on the outside off. I'm sure there's lots of chefs that will tell you lots of ways to do it, but I just used a vegetable peeler. It's actually pretty soft.



Now, there's a couple of things you can do here. I've seen Emeril cut these into fingers, dip them into tempura batter and fry them. Personally, I like dicing them up and using them for other things. The problem is, they're still kind of hard. My pumpkin happened to be pretty ripe, and therefore softer than usual, but it still needed a little more softening. My favorite solution: steam!

Everyone has a steamer basket hanging around in their kitchen. Well, except for my brother. He apparently doesn't have one. Those of you who don't, head down to your local supermarket, pick up some cheap aluminum pie tins, poke a few holes in one of them, and pow! You have a steamer basket. Just make a snake out of aluminum foil, coil it on the bottom of a pot, and lay your perforated pie tin on top. Well, go ahead and add some water to the pot first, just about an inch or so. Then put your pie tin or steamer basket on top. If there's water touching the bottom part of the basket, there's too much.



Now, once you've sliced or diced up all your pumpkin and brought the water to a boil, go ahead and dump it all in there. Or maybe just half of it. To be honest, even a sugar pumpkin has a lot of meat. If you have too much in there, then the pieces on the bottom will overcook while the stuff on the top stays hard. I went with two different installments, just to be safe. Cover and cook until fork tender. For those not in the know, that means that when you stick a fork into it, the food yields to gentle pressure, but isn't mushy. In my case, that only took about five minutes. Be careful when removing the lid! I'm sporting a nice little steam burn this morning to remind me of my carelessness last night.



Now that the pumpkin is fork tender, what do you do with it? Well, it depends on whether you're planning on using it now or saving it for later. I had plans to use half of mine that evening, and save half for the next evening. So when my first batch came out, I dunked it in an ice water bath to stop the cooking. Then I moved it to a plastic container and dropped it off in the fridge. But the second batch, that one I had immediate plans for.

I heated a skillet to medium-high, added a wee bit of peanut oil and my half of a sugar pumpkin, diced, along with about a quarter teaspoon of salt. I love pumpkin, but it does tend to be pretty bland without any seasoning. I sauteed for a couple of minutes until I got some nice color, and then added half a cup of diced red bell pepper, and a quarter cup of diced jalapeno. I continued to saute, making sure I had a good bit of color on everything, but in particular, the pumpkin. That's when I added half a cup of chicken broth, one 6.5 ounce can of coconut milk and two teaspoons of curry powder. I brought this to a simmer and let it cook uncovered, stirring occassionally, until the liquid had reduced most of the way.

Now, while all of this had been going on, I decided that I wasn't about to have curry without some kind of rice to put it on. Inspired by my most recent visit to Bombay House, I heated a pan to medium, with a little peanut oil in it. I added a cup of white rice (yeah, I know they use Jasmine rice, but I'm out) and a teaspoon of whole cumin seeds. I sauteed it all until it was nice and toasty, added my cup of chicken broth, brought to a boil, covered it, and let it sit on low heat for twenty minutes. Then I pulled it off the heat and let it sit for another ten minutes before uncovering it. I laid out the rice on a plate, and dished out some pumpkin curry next to it. The resulting dish was... well, let's just say we were lucky to have any leftovers. It was really good.



What about the pumpkin seeds? Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about them. First, you need to separate the seeds from the pulp as best you can. This isn't an easy prospect. I got the big pieces out, and then I got a brilliant idea! I took the bowl with the seeds and remaining pulp, and filled it halfway with water. As I swished the water around with my fingers, I found that the seeds tended to float to the top, while the pulp tended to sink to the bottom.



This made it relatively easy to get the seeds out. I pulled them out, dumped them onto a sheet pan, and tossed them into a 350F oven. I would occassionally pull it out and give the seeds a stir. Roasting them took about 20 minutes, give or take. At one point, I gave them a spritz of water and sprinkled them with cinnamon. I figured the water would help make the spice stick to the seeds, and I was right. When they were nice and dry and cinnamony, I pulled them out and let them cool on the sheet pan before moving them into a little serving bowl.



The seeds were good. The curry was good. And I still have pumpkin left over to play with tonight! Truly, this whole pumpkin thing works out really well for me, every time.

Why I Love Perl

Okay, so there are lots of reasons why I love Perl. I'm just going to tell you about the most recent one. If you haven't noticed already, I tend to be a bit of a shutterbug sometimes. I love taking pictures. I take pictures of my food on a regular basis, I take pictures at the Utah Bakers Dozen meetings, sometimes I even take pictures of just random objects.

This Monday was the most recent Utah Bakers Dozen meeting, and I showed up with my camera. There were a variety of desserts there, most of which had recipes. Some people brought multiple copies of their recipes, some people brought only one. I was sure to grab a copy of each recipe that had multiple copies, and photograph the ones that only had one copy (isn't 5 megapixel great?). The next day I retyped all of the recipes (I haven't been able to find Linux drivers for my scanner yet) and posted them on the UBD site. I also snapped off about a hundred photos of food, some of which weren't all that great. Having removed the photos I didn't want to show anyone, I still had about 60 photos, give or take. I wanted to post these on the UBD site (along with photos from past meetings), but there was going to be a lot of work involved.

I wanted to attach a UBD logo in the corner, just like I do with the images in my wallpaper area. I also wanted to make three different resolutions available, plus the thumbnail. And then there was the problem of making index pages for everything. Now, I had been through several different web-based gallery programs, and none of them really impressed me. Most were overly complex for what I wanted to accomplish, and still didn't offer all of the options that I actually wanted. The best one I found was Apache::Gallery, which Jayce uses on his site. I liked that it was written in Perl. I liked that it pretty much takes care of itself once you get it running. There were only a couple of problems with it. First of all, I didn't like having to disable DirectoryIndex. I don't use it at the moment, but I've used it several times in the past and I didn't want to limit myself. Plus, there was still the problem of the logo in the corner. Part of the reason I post photos is to provide content to keep people coming back to the site. Branding my photos would ensure that they knew where the photos came from, and hopefully encourage them to come back. And last, but not least, I couldn't get it working and I didn't want to spend the time fighting with it. I've found that when I start out fighting with a program, I tend to keep fighting with it until I give up and find something better.

Obviously, it was time to take matters into my own hands. I'd already used Image::Magick in the past, so I decided to use that. The idea was simple: write a script that takes each photo, stamps my logo in the corner and write out all the resolutions that I need. That didn't take long at all. But then it occurred to me that I would still have to create HTML indexes for the images. Why not have my script build a table for me? I could cut it where I needed to and then paste the tables into a pre-made template. Building the table was easy. And then I thought: wait a minute, why am I cutting up the table and pasting everything manually? It only took a few more simple steps to tell the script to create all the pages for me. Before long, I had the script pulling images from a source directory, writing new files to new destination directories, each numbered with the page of images that it held (/page1, /page2, etc). It was writing the index pages out with links to the other pages at the top and bottom of each page. It was doing all the work for me. Now I have a pretty nice-looking gallery of images from Monday's meeting posted.

Of course, there was a catch. All of my tweaking took time. In fact, I daresay it took about the same amount of time to write, debug and tweak my script as it would have to manually add my logo to each image, save out various resolutions and write the index pages. On the other hand, I didn't have to suffer through the tedium of doing all of that manually, and I got to give my brain a little excercise. Even better, when I process the next round of photos, it will only be a couple of minutes worth of actual work. With the first set of photos, I broke even on the time. But I have officially saved myself from hours of tedium and boredom that could be spent doing other things that I actually want to do, or at least should be doing.

There are a couple more things that I like about my little script. First of all, my little server isn't very powerful. I don't want images being generated on the fly, each time somebody wants to download something. In fact, I don't think I want a whole lot of pages generated on the fly. Text processing doesn't take up a lot of overhead. In fact, it generally takes almost none. But the more hits you get at a time, the more it takes. Static pages have less overhead than anything else, they're faster than anything else, and they're easier for search engines to index. Of course, that generally means more files to manage, but I'm willing to accept that for now. I'm dynamically generating the static pages anyway.

The script is admittedly still a bit rough. There's one minor bug that I know about, and several things that I would still like to make it do. Harley suggested that I release it to the public. Actually, he suggests I do that for pretty much everything I write. It's the whole open source thing, you know. Maybe I'll go ahead and release it when I have it a little more polished.

Weekend Challenge 2 Results

I decided to go a little easier on you folks this time around. Oddly, I didn't get as many entries as the first Weekend Challenge, despite the relative ease. I did get one entry emailed to me, along with a photo, but the person who sent it failed to also post it in the comments area. Remember, the rules do state that you need to post your recipe in the comments area, where everyone can see it. Hopefully that person knows who he is (since I sent him an email and all), and will post his entry as soon as possible in the comments area. As soon as he does so, I'll go ahead and post his photo.

My entry was pretty straight-forward. I diced up three roma tomatoes, added a couple of tablespoons of roasted red peppers (in the form of canned diced pimento), a chiffonade of a couple of leaves of basil, about a tablespoon of crumbled feta cheese, a clove of garlic minced very fine, a splash each of Balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, and a pinch each of black pepper and Kosher salt. Pow! Fresh Mediterranian Salsa!

What can you do with such a thing? You can pile it onto bruscetta, you can dip pita chips into it, you can use it as a condiment for just about anything Italian or Greek, or you can do what I did. I took some cucumber, cut it into half-inch rounds, cut off the peel with a round fluted cutter, scooped out a little bowl with a mellon baller, and then filled each one with my fresh salsa. You've got to be careful scooping them out, so that you don't cut through the bottom. You also need to make sure not to pile these so high with salsa that people can't see the sides or pick them up.



And now for your entries! I really liked Tensai's stuffed tomato entry. It's important to not with this sort of thing that you really need to be using large globe tomatoes (or slicing tomatoes, as he calls them). Another thing that you need to remember is that when you stuff something like this, you do need to make sure that the filling is fully cooked. Remember: when stuffing things, you should be reheating the stuffing, not cooking it. Another thing I liked about his entry were the jalapenos. I love hot food. Kudos to Tensai on his recipe.

Art's entry was even simpler. Her chili took just a few minutes of prep time in the morning, little more than tossing a bunch of ingredients in the crock pot and letting it sit all day. Her chile cornbread reminded me of a similar recipe that we used to make when I was working at a bakery. It also reminded me of Business Management class in cooking school, when we were discussing menu descriptions. One student used "sweet" in her cornbread recipe, and another thought that it was redundant, since cornbread is always sweet anyway. Neither considered that there is also such a thing as savory cornbread, which I prefer far and above sweet cornbread. My thanks to Art for her Chili and Cornbread meal.

Charles' dip was also a nice entry. In fact, he only used one additional ingredient: red onion. Were I making this dish for my wife, I think I would probably leave the red onion out, but if she weren't around, I wouldn't hesitate to put it in. At the end he says to throw it all in a bowl, grab a bag of tortilla chips and dig in. I'm the sort that would cook it all first, minus the cheddar, and then pour over a pan full of chips covered in cheddar, before baking at 350F for five to ten minutes. Either way, I think you'll be happy.

Thanks to everyone that played! Tune in this Friday for another episode of The Weekend Challenge!

Weekend Challenge 2

Hey, kiddies! What time is it? That's right, it's time for...

The Weekend Challenge 2!

You have the following five items in your kitchen:

• Tomatoes
• Chiles (your choice)
• Cheese (your choice)
• Basil
• Garlic

They were fresh when you bought them, but you've had them for a few days and now you know that if you don't use them, you'll lose them. You need to make a dish or even a meal using all of these ingredients. Fortunately, your kitchen is pretty well-stocked this week, so you have plenty of other ingredients. You can add any other ingredients you want, but you have to use these five in whatever you make. What's it going to be? It looks like something Italian is in order, but I will give you bonus points if you can pull off something a little more exotic.

You have until Monday morning to come up with something and post it to my comments area. You can use any cooking method out there, or you can even go raw. You may not want to get too close to your guests after serving them raw garlic, but it's your call. You have three days, people! Good luck!

Updates and Slides

Life is just strange sometimes. Somebody posted an anonymous request for my slides from last night's AWStats presentation. I don't know who would be interested in such a thing, but I did promise to post them, so here they are. You'll need OpenOffice.org installed to view them, but of course you have that installed anyway. If you don't, why not download it now? It's free, multi-platform and it doesn't have any spyware crap.

I'm a lot more excited to post some new wallpaper! Looking through my photos, I found a few more that I thought might make some keen wallpaper. Unfortunately, none of these ones are of food or mushrooms. In fact, I had to create two new categories for them, Nature and Miscellaneous. These photos are from all around the country, but mostly in Utah and New England. Don't worry, I do have some more food photos taken, and a couple of them are wallpaper-worthy. But I need to hold off on them for a couple of weeks, until I make sure I have all the permissions worked out with where I shot them. Hint: they involve apples.

For now, here's a couple of samples of today's posts:

Theories on Frying

Frying is an interesting thing to me, especially deep frying. The fat is like a pan that can completely surround every molecole of exposed surface area, including the little nooks and crannies. It is a cooking method in which part of the cooking equipment is actually edible, and becomes a part of the food being cooked. How cool is that? Steaming is close, but not really quite the same.

Bearing that in mind, I have heard several cooks proclaim that other cooking methods technically qualify as deep frying. For instance, if you take a potato, you coat it in oil, and then you toss it in the oven, the oven is actually heating the oil, which then cooks the potato. This is partially true, and I used to even believe that this was a form of deep frying. I am now starting to reconsider.

You see, there's more to deep frying that just hot oil encapsulating the food being cooked. In fact, there is a lot of oil. And that oil is being kept in a container of some sort. Either that container itself or a heating element inside of it is being heated, which heats the fat, which cooks the food. How does this differ from my baked potato example? One word: air. In the oven, there is a lot of air between the heating device and the food. As it turns out, air isn't very dense. It doesn't really hold onto heat very well. And when you open that oven door, a good deal of that heat will escape, even if you've been preheating the oven for three days and the walls are nice and hot.

I'm a big fan of oven fries. My recipe is simple: wash some russet potatoes, slice 'em into wedges, toss them in oil and spices, and bake at 400F until fork tender. How simple is that? And yet, I discovered a problem recently. Normally, especially if I have a lot of potatoes, I just toss them all on a sheet pan and bake them more or less however they fall. One day I decided to stand the potatoes so that they were sitting with the peel side on the pan. This would expose the least amount of pan to potato, which would cut down on burned spices. Or so I thought.



The resulting fries were disappointing, to say the least. Some were well-cooked, but most of them were hard and raw-tasting. If I'd been a customer at a restaurant, I would have sent them back. In short, they sucked. I decided to try something different the next time around. This time I decided to lay down the wedges on their sides. After 20 minutes, I turned them all over onto the other side and gave them another 20 minutes. This would provide direct contact with the pan on 2/3 of the surface area. I was running a chance of burning my spices, but now I had science at stake. After 40 minutes of baking, I would stand the wedges on the backs as I had done the first time and let them finish like that.



The results were staggeringly different! The sides of the fries had a deeper, more golden brown color. Each one was perfectly cooked and had the same fluffy potato goodness inside. The oil seemed to have protected the spices, which weren't even remotely burned. Even better, they achieved this level of greatness after only 40 minutes! The first batch had taken well over an hour, and some of the fries were still hard! Still, potatoes aren't the only ingredient in question here. I had to test bacon.

Something that I learned just before heading off to cooking school was how to cook bacon the way the pros supposedly cook bacon. Take a sheet pan, put a cooling rack on top of it, and then line the cooling rack with bacon. Toss it in a hot oven and let the excess fat drip away while the bacon baked its way to a crispily lean deliciousness. Unfortunately, this method always seemed to produce limply palid strips of greasiness when I tried it. The only advantage was volume: it's much faster to cook large volumes of bacon this way, unless you have a commercial griddle hanging out in your kitchen. Most people don't. Actually, come to think of it, there's a second advantage too: your bacon ends up straight. This is mostly a cosmetic advantage.

I prepared another sheet pan. I had used aluminum foil on the last one to eliminate cleanup, so I decided to use the same conditions. I had no delusions of no-mess cleanup with the bacon, but I did hope that there would be less scrubbing involved than without the foil. In fact, I had baked bacon last week without foil, and would eventually find with this that there was in fact less scrubbing, even if the bacon fat did find its way under the foil. But I digress. I lined the pan with a pound of bacon, directly on the foil. With the oven set to 500F, I tossed the pan in and checked it every few minutes. I would occassionally pull the pan out and flip the bacon with my tongs.



This produced the straight strips of bacon that I was used to with the cooling rack method. But it also produced crisp pieces of bacon. In complete defiance of Alton Brown's warnings to the contrary, I laid out my bacon on paper towls to drain off the excess fat. Despite the paper towels supposedly holding the fat up against my bacon, it was still markedly less greasy than the cooling rack method. It was crispy, flavorful and good. Even better, it didn't have grid marks from the cooling pan. And just like with the cooling rack, I was still able to drain away the fat easily once the bacon was removed from the pan.

Now, under the above theory about "deep frying" potatoes, I think that cooking bacon with just about any method would qualify as deep frying, just because bacon contains enough fat that it might as well be coated in it. However, using the air to heat that fat seems to be an excercise in failure in several instances. What is really needed is direct contact. This is why cake decorators use a heating core when baking unusually large cakes: the core provides additional direct heat contact to the middle of the cake, which certainly would be gooey were it left to the air to do the job. So apparently it's time to reconsider this theory of what qualifies as deep frying and what doesn't. If you're baking it, then call it baking. If you're braising or steaming, that's what you need to call it. A coating of fat may provide some advantage, but it's not deep frying.

AWStats Presentation Tonight at PLUG

Tonight at the Provo Linux Users Group, I will be presenting on AWStats. I will be covering a few basics with it, and then getting into some of the cool little features that not a whole lot of people really know about. The meeting technically starts at 7:30pm, but I recommend getting there by 6:30pm to see Fozz's presentation on the Catalyst web framework.

Head over to the PLUG website for additional information and diretions.