Red Light House

I’m looking at my fingernails right now, wondering if they’re going to turn orange. Sam and I have eaten something pumpkin related every day this week. My dad tells this great story about two girls he went to college or grad school with who ran out of money so they ate nothing but carrots for a couple of weeks straight and they built up so much Beta Carotene (or whatever) in their system that their skin and nails took on an orange hue. Luckily I’ve been mixing up my diet of pumpkin with Grape-Nuts, instant oatmeal and turkey sandwiches so I’m probably safe from getting that lovely tan-in-a-bottle coloring that’s so hot with all the ladies in the winter time.

The pumpkin ravioli previously described were a treat, but they were definitely a little high maintenance so we went with something easier the next day and made Alton Brown’s pumpkin bread (only substituting walnuts for the pumpkin seeds). His recipe was the only one we could find that called for fresh grated pumpkin instead of canned puree, which was a definite plus. We slung the grater attachment on to the ol’ food processor (a house warming present from Sammi’s mom to commemorate her daughter living in sin…does a high powered motor and whirring, razor sharp blades mean something? Maybe.) and it made short work of grating the 6 cups of pumpkin needed for the two loaves we were baking. I took stock of the pumpkin supply left in the fridge and estimated that we had about 12 to 16 cups remaining. Good lord.

While Sammi was working on the pumpkin bread I worked on the pumpkin seeds we had saved from earlier in the week. I spread the seeds out on a cookie sheet, sprayed them with Pam and sprinkled salt, paprika, white pepper and garlic powder on them. Into a 350 degree oven they went and after about 10 minutes the kitchen started smelling like a pizza parlor. Go figure. After 15 or 20 minutes they started making popping noises so I took them out and we snacked on them while finishing up the bread. They were pretty good, though I was definitely a little heavy handed on the spices and some of them had enough of the white pepper to make my eyes tear up.

The bread wound up taking forever to bake as I’m pretty sure our oven uses a couple of light bulbs and half a book of matches to produce heat. They were supposed to be done in an hour and 15 minutes but we wound up baking them for 2 hours before we could stick them with a tooth pick and not hear screams of pain. Regardless, it was time well spent and they turned out really well. Sam took one to work and said they devoured it like hungry jackals. Our loaf at home is now about half done and is awesome as a quick breakfast to eat as we’re leaving the house in the morning.

Last night I had a late softball game so there was time to make dinner before I left. We decided to try our hand at making chicken and pumpkin curry, which is always a favorite of ours if we can find a Thai restaurant that makes it. I’ve tried making curries before with widely differing results, there’s a process to it that I just don’t have down yet, but this one turned out as our best effort to date. I credit the use of yogurt and tomato paste.

The general ingredients list is as follows:

• One package of boneless, skinless chicken thighs (about 6 or 7), cut up into bite sized pieces.
• An equal amount of pumpkin cut into half-inch cubes (you can also use sweet potato, squash, regular potato, or just skip it all together)
• One container of plain yogurt (8 oz or so)
• Tomato paste (half of one of those little cans)
• 1 yellow onion, thinly sliced in long pieces
• Curry Powder
• Garam Masala (sold in the spice aisle)
• Salt
• Black pepper
• Cayenne Pepper (if desired)
• Chicken Stock
• Vegetable Oil
• Lemon juice
• Cooked white rice

Put the cut up chicken into a bowl with the yogurt. Add the curry powder, garam masala (use a lot), salt and pepper and mix it all up. I wound up using a lot more salt as the cooking progressed than I thought I would, so be prepared for that. Let that mixture sit in the bowl while you let your girlfriend prepare the rice and cut up the onion. Do not laugh at her when she cries from cutting the onion. She has a knife after all.

Heat up a large, heavy pot or dutch oven on medium heat with enough vegetable oil to cover the bottom of the pot. Cook the onion with a pinch of salt, stirring occasionally, until very soft and sweet, about 10 minutes. Lower the heat and spoon in tomato paste. Stir until the onions are completely coated with the paste. With the heat still on low, slide the chicken and yogurt mixture into the pan and stir until all ingredients are well incorporated. Add the pumpkin and pour in chicken stock until liquid almost comes to the top of the ingredients. Crank the heat until it starts to bubble, then lower it down to a simmer. You don’t want to hurry the cooking. Leaving it at a simmer will insure that the chicken is tender, and the pumpkin will cook all the way through so the resulting dish is soft and nice.

After 20 or so minutes the chicken should be cooked all the way through (cut a piece in half if you want to be sure), the pumpkin pieces should be soft and tender and the sauce should be reduced and thickened. Start tasting the sauce to see what seasoning adjustments are needed. Like I said, I wound up putting a lot more salt into it so it wasn’t bland. I also added a little ground cayenne pepper, and a spoonful of lemon juice.

Serve over the rice and enjoy. With booze.

One of our many pumpkins went under the knife this weekend. Not for jack-o-lantern purposes but for get-in-our-belly purposes. Sam bought a Cinderella pumpkin which is supposed to be good eatin’ and on Sunday night we decided to make pumpkin ravioli! Making ravioli is a sure fire way to impress someone, and while it may be a little more involved than your typical meal it’s not complicated at all, it just requires a little bit of labor.

To start we cut off the top and then used an ice-cream scooper to get all the guts out. The scoop works incredibly well and makes me look back at all those years of sticking my hand inside the cold, slimy interior of a pumpkin with disgust and regret. Sam got busy separating the seeds from the guts while I hacked the pumpkin in half and started peeling off the skin. Easier said than done. Much like myself, pumpkins are very attached to their skin and are loathe to give it up without a fight. Most recipes that talk about cooking with fresh pumpkin don’t really go into this part of it because it would most likely scare away the faint of heart. I was using our Oxo Good Grips vegetable peeler on it and at times it felt like I was trying peel a banana with a piece of wet spaghetti.

After a while I started really bearing down on it and finally got a good toe hold from which to work from. Once you get one portion peeled it’s much easier to branch out from that to the rest of the pumpkin. Sammi used this occasion to tell me that if we got married we could surely register for some magical kitchen device that would allow me to peel a pumpkin with a flick of the wrist. I withheld telling her that once we’re married I would no longer be in the kitchen for longer than it takes to get a beer out of the fridge, rightly assuming that I could not fend her off with just a vegetable peeler.

Once the half pumpkin was completely naked I cut it in pieces that looked like cantaloupe slices, then cut those into smaller cubes to put in our steamer. While those were going Sammi volunteered to peel the second half of the pumpkin and then began an epic battle of Woman vs. Gourd that shall be written in the history books. There was a lot of cursing, sweating and flying pieces of pumpkin and some pony tail holders but eventually Sammi prevailed and stood victorious over the defeated pumpkin. She pulled out her knife and licked the blade before plunging it into it’s heart. She laughed wildly and looked around with battle lust in her eyes. The curtains caught fire.

We now had way more pumpkin than we needed for the ravioli, possibly more than we’d ever need for our entire lives so I cut it all up into more manageable pieces, put it into 2 big Ziplocs and shoved them into the back of the fridge for future bread or pie making (I hope). The pumpkin in the steamer was now completely cooked through so we removed it on put it into the food processor. A few seconds later we had baby food. Except the only baby that could eat it would have to be a fire-proof baby because it was still super hot.

We now had, what recipes call, “pumpkin puree”. This is where most recipes start, “Add the pumpkin puree to this…stir in pumpkin puree to that…blah blah blah,” but we had traveled the hard back road to get to the beginning. Pretty impressive, I know.

From this point it was a pretty simple matter of sautéing a shallot in some butter, then adding the pumpkin and cooking out all the water. We added salt and pepper until it tasted good, then added whole milk, sage, nutmeg and parmesan cheese until it tasted REALLY good.

The greatest secret to making ravioli is to use the pre-made egg roll (wonton) wrappers for the pasta. It’s made out of the same stuff as pasta, really. If you can get the smaller ones that’s best, but I could only find the largest size so we cut them in quarters and that worked fine. It’s tempting to try and stuff the ravioli’s as full as possible, but this is a mistake. If you ever try and make them you’re not going to listen to me at first, but you’ll see soon enough. Just put a little dollop in the middle of the wonton square, run a wet finger over two adjacent edges and then fold over into a triangle. Try and push as much air out as you can, then press the edges closed. Then take a fork and crimp around the two edges…this is added insurance against the ravioli breaking apart and also makes it look prettier, I think.

Another great thing about the wonton wrappers is that they only take like 3 minutes to cook in boiling water. Sam put them in the water and after a few minutes she drained them into a colander and then gingerly dried off each on by hand with a paper towel. I wouldn’t recommend this step to anyone, but it was cute to see her treat each ravioli like a wet puppy. She then melted a little butter in a pan and quickly fried the ravioli’s with some more cut up sage. When they were lightly browned we took them out and ate those suckers! They were awesome.

I think we just had 7 or 8 ravioli’s a piece last night, but we wound up making three times that many and they are currently sitting in the freezer. They’ll just take 5 minutes in boiling water to become another awesome meal.

You wouldn’t think that spilling skim milk on a white shirt would leave a visible mark when it dries, would you?

CoCo: If you guys want to make life easy on me you’d go out for drinks in the Mission so I could quickly join you after practice. That’s just my selfish 2 cents.

Stas: that’s just plain selffish…

C: I had to try.

S: i like sunset idea, because i can stay at coreen’s place. so there.

C: you drove and I didn’t, so it shouldn’t matter to you. So there.

S: i’ll give you a ride to sunset.

C: MY FISTS WILL GIVE YOU A RIDE TO PAIN-TOWN!!!!!

S: why yell, do you? i come up and kick you. now.

Don’t.

Last week we popped into The Rickshaw stop to catch the Bobby Bare Jr. show. We were introduced to Mr. Bare Jr. last year at the Bottom of the Hill and both Sammi and I really enjoyed the show and his CD “From the End of Your Leash”. We were tired, but I wanted to go to the show regardless as I was pretty sure this was going to be the last time we’d get to see Bobby Bare Jr. for 10 bucks at a small venue. We got to the Rickshaw at around 9pm and the first band had yet to play. Fortunately the venue is true to it’s name and has a number of rickshaws set up around the floor and we took a seat in one with shiny pink seats and Christmas lights strung around the canopy.

As well as many primitive forms of taxis, the Rickshaw Stop also has a very good sound system, unfortunately either their sound guy is deaf or was controlling the master volume from the street outside because there were 747’s flying by telling us to turn the music down. Sammi and I bought ear plugs from the bar (most venues seem to sell them, which is awesome) which brought the music down to tolerable levels and we settled back into our pink rickshaw to enjoy the show.

Both opening bands, Tom Heyman and Ghostfinger, were excellent and during set breaks I saw Bobby Bare Jr. walking around…he’s a hard guy to miss, built very much like a powerful badger with an afro. So I got a chance to completely embarrass Sammi by buying his new CD and getting him to sign it.

It reads: “Collin, Flowers and Tacos. Bobby Bare Jr.” It’s like he looked into my soul.

When Bobby finally took the stage Sammi had been asleep on my shoulder for about half an hour, and a large crowd a folks somehow materialized and pushed up close to the stage, blocking our view. Bobby stood up and said, “Is it too loud out there? When I was standing out there it was pretty painful…but the good kind of pain.”

“NOOOOOOO!!!” the crowd yelled, YEEEESSSS I wanted to say. But it was clear to me at this point the show was not for the two sleepy people sitting in the pink rickshaw.

While watching an episode of The Office with a pregnant couple from out of town the father-to-be said something to the effect of, “That’s some funny shit..”

“Hey!!!!” the mother-to-be yelled, cupping her hands around the sides of her round belly, “Not near the baby! I need to earmuff it so it can’t hear you!”

Sam and I laughed. And then, when we realized that she was being completely serious, we laughed some more.

We went out to dinner last night with two other couples who were both pregnant. That is, the women were pregnant, the men were just dazed. Before leaving the house Sammi went through her typical ritual of putting her clothes on, looking at herself, coming out to get my feedback, telling me I’m no help, and then trying something else on. Only this time I said something very helpful:

“Tonight should be the easiest time you ever have picking out something to wear,” I said, “You know you’re going to be the skinniest girl there.”

C: How was the pumpkin patch?

S: Oh, it was fun!

C: How many pumpkins did you get?

S: I got one for carving, one for eating, and some others for decoration.

C: Wow, how many total?

S: Oh, a few.