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Keep Pumpkins Weird

Spooky season is when I find the weirdest, ugliest – and most delicious – pumpkin I can at the farmers market

The Fall is my favourite time of year. The changing of the seasons helps me feel how time is passing. This time last year I didn’t have a kitchen, floors, or a YouTube channel. Just a mini-fridge, a hot plate, and ever-changing deadlines.

This year has somehow been more chaotic, which I didn’t think possible – but I finally have a working kitchen (though the kitchen is still not done, that’s a story for another day).

So I wanted to start cooking for joy again. A few weeks back, on Canadian Thanksgiving, I got to have fun in the kitchen for the first time in… 2 years? I finally have a full set of working appliances, and so I am back to cooking and recipe developing in earnest.

Since I’m doing a bit of catch up, here’s all my new recipes for September and October:

For Thanksgiving, I went to the Kitchener farmers market to collect some weird, edible pumpkins and squash. I got the traditional sugar pumpkin, but also a Pink Porcelain Doll, a George Candy Roaster, a Red Kuri (Hokkaido Pumpkin) – not to mention some honey nut squash, acorn squash, butternut, and patty pans! Ask your local farmers which ones are delicious.

Roasting your own pumpkin is quite a bit of work, but worth the effort. They’re hard to cut open (stab directly into the heart), they take 60-90 minutes to roast (at 425°F, rub with olive oil, salt, and optionally pepper), then you have to cool them, scrape out the flesh, and puree it. If you don’t roast your pumpkins long enough they are very watery, which isn’t great for most pumpkin recipes (like pie or pumpkin bread).

You have to roast the pumpkin until the skin is blistered and dark, perhaps the pumpkin collapsed, and a fork can pierce through the flesh as easily as Dracula’s fangs.

If you put in this work the reward is there: roasted pumpkin tastes amazing. The long roasting time converts the starches into sugars, caramelizing the pumpkin. The heirloom varieties test better than anything you can get in a can. And if you’re making soup, you can even roast garlic under the pumpkins. Or, for the even more ambitious, roast your pumpkin on the grill.

As a bonus, you get to roast your own pumpkin seeds – which are my favourite snack in the world. Plus you get to support local farmers and help increase biodiversity. Did you know that every can of pumpkin puree sold in the US and Canada comes from a single variety of squash? Dickinson squash.

You can fit 2 pumpkins per baking sheet, so I suggest roasting them 2 or 4 at a time. Then save the puree in the freezer in 750g containers – the same as what’s in can. Then you’ll be in business for the rest of fall.

I made a bunch of great classics:

Getting through this Fall content calendar was very hard (I work full time, this is a hobby!) but I’m proud of the recipes I did get out the door – and even happier that I was able to execute on my Halloween special.

The Halloween special wouldn’t be possible without the help of my friends: Lex, for all his amazing theme songs (Regular, Dracula, and Halloween Special); Sam, for standing in the rain and squatting on my kitchen counters to be the the “third person” camera; Brett ,for somehow making Clicker noises with his voice in his commitment to helping me achieve video game accuracy. I’ve never put myself out there like this before, and if my friends can do such wacky things to support me, then surely I can embrace my own weirdness.

I can be the weird pumpkin I want to see in the world.

If you want to support what I’m doing here the most meaningful ways are to share this content with your friends who like to cook. Share this newsletter, send the videos to friends, post the links on your feeds. Watch the videos (all the way through!), comment, subscribe, and – sigh – smash that like button. You can also shop my favourite cookbooks, but I’d prefer you support a local independent bookstore.

Your infrequent newsletter writer,

Marko