Last November, I found myself alone in my kitchen with two medium-sized pumpkins. I had bought them to decorate my front porch for Halloween, but decided—thanks to a semi-obsessive, Depression era attitude towards wasting food—not to carve them.
Though I wasn’t born anytime near the Great Depression, somewhere along the way I’ve picked up the notion that letting food go to waste is tantamount to killing puppies. Unlike many Americans, who will only eat and purchase glossy, unblemished, and uncharactered fruits and vegetables, I thrive on ways to turn one person’s trash into my next meal. I hate mushy apples, but if you were to give me one, I wouldn’t throw it away; I’d make applesauce. I call this resourcefulness; my friends call it “ghetto.”
Times of abundance, therefore, are both a blessing and a curse. I love having prolific fruit trees, but the sheer volume of food can make me insane. What to do with all this wonderful fruit hanging from the branches and dropping to the ground? I spend an inordinate amount of time scurrying about, collecting bushels and bags of apples to give away, eat, cook, and freeze. Just last week, I tiptoed into my neighbor’s yard, where they had let dozens of grapefruit fall to the ground, to try to salvage some of the golden globes. Into the night I was juicing, wondering whom among my friends liked Greyhounds, and just how much vodka I would need to accompany all this wonderful liquid.
With my penchant for avoiding waste, Halloween puts me in a particularly rough spot. I know it’s tradition, and I know kids like jack-o-lanterns, but growing a bunch of perfectly edible fruit only to carve them up and throw them away seems particularly wasteful. “Only in America!” I like to say, my hands thrown in the air, my friend’s eyes rolling. (Of course, if ever you’ve been outside America, you know that food is sacrificed throughout the world—for decoration, to the gods, into the trash.)
I have no problem with other people’s carved pumpkins; I think they’re pretty and festive and I like to stroll the hood admiring the creative designs. But last year, maybe because I was unemployed and broke, or maybe because I was feeling guilty about letting those two mushrooms get moldy in my fridge, I decided to turn my still intact decorations into food. The only problem: what, exactly, does one do with a whole pumpkin?
I began by wrestling them to the cutting board, where even my sharpest knife was having difficulty slicing the thick rind. I knew there was no hope in peeling them, so instead I decided to steam them in whole chunks, resulting in what I was sure would be a wonderful pumpkin puree. I managed to cut through half a pumpkin when I realized—something that should have been immediately obvious—that pumpkins are big. They have a lot of flesh. About one-eighth of one pumpkin could fit into my one steamer. I brought out another large pot, then another, and another, until all four of my burners were blazing, and I was frantically chopping.
I washed, salted, and oiled the pumpkin seeds and stuck them in the oven to roast. With all four burners going, and my oven on, my kitchen started to feel like Dante’s Inferno. Despite the cool November air, I opened all my windows and stripped down to a tank top.
As one batch of pumpkin chunks would finish, another would be tossed in. I immediately tried to scrape the hot flesh from the rind but, my chemistry background failing me, I didn’t realize that the pumpkin pieces, cooked in boiling water, were one hundred degrees Celsius. My impatience resulted in numerous fingers burns. I was starting to realize why more people don’t cook pumpkins, and started to wonder why I was. Why do I have to pretend I’m some sort of hardscrabble pioneer woman? Why can’t I just carve a little happy face, and then throw the damned squash in the trash, or the compost, or over into the neighbors’ yard? Finished! Done! Easy!
