FCG: Dinner in a Pumpkin 10/22/04

Hi Gang!How is everyone? Enjoying the fall weather...wherever you are? Another candy holiday looms on the horizon for us: in fact, maybe the most candy-centric of them all. I'm talking about Halloween, the night of begging strangers for candy, something every parent warns against. Maybe it IS still about letting evil rule the night (and not just about the candy like some of us think). Hmmm.... The bastardization (can I say that gang?) of holidays is an interesting phenomenon to me. Not that I'm about to join a wicca and start celebrating dark rites this time of year, nor is it that I'm superstitious about evil spirits lurking in wait, coming out to dance one night a year until the cock crows at dawn (echoes of Danse Macabre by Saint-Saens going through my head), but what if we celebrated holidays as they were intended instead of a feast of stomach-churning candy corn? That means we would get two holidays because of All Souls Day being November First. Think of the possibilities! Two days of candy corn! (Aaaaahhhhh!!!!!!!) (When you're my age, it's all about the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, though, let me tell you! Forget dressing up, I just like that my favorite candies go on sale.)

Today's recipe comes from Eva of our group. Each year she hosts her annual dinner-in-a-pumpkin and pumpkin-carving night at her home wherein everyone is invited to bring a pumpkin to carve and to join in the feast of dinner cooked (guess where!) in a pumpkin. It's a pretty neat presentation (I've been to a couple in years past). I imagine you could fill the pumpkin with whatever kind of casserole you like. I even looked through a book about pumpkins recently that had a soup you baked right in the pumpkin which was made of layers of gruyere and croutons covered by cream and then baked slowly. It was called "Soupe de Courge" which we'll have to have Abby of our group pronounce (my own French being terrible) if you want to know how it's said. Of course, a soup concocted exclusively of cream and cheese will probably kill one, so maybe this year we'll stick with the dinner-in-a-pumpkin recipe. :) Without further ado, I give you:

Dinner in a Pumpkin
1 medium pumpkin (I take "medium" in this case to mean however big your pumpkin needs to be to house the amount of casserole you're willing to make and eat.)
1 1/2 lbs ground beef (I cut this way down myself, but whatever you want.)
1 tsp salt (Right. There's soy sauce later in the recipe, may want to cut back on the sodium.)
2/3 c chopped celery
1/3 c diced green pepper
1 4-oz can sliced mushrooms
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 8-oz can sliced water chestnuts
2 TBSP soy sauce
2 cups hot cooked rice

Cut off the top of the pumpkin and clear out the seeds and fibers and grossies inside that you don't want to deal with, just like if you were going to carve it. (You could assembly-line your pumpkins early in the day if you're carving and serving this on the same day: get all gross once, but have your pumpkins prepped and ready for carving later.) Preheat the oven to 350 F. Brown the beef and stir in the salt, celery, mushrooms, pepper, and soup. Cover that and simmer for about 10 minutes. Add the rice, soy sauce, and water chestnuts and stir it all up. Spoon it all into your lovely cleaned-out pumpkin, replace the top, and put the whole thing on a baking sheet. Bake at 1 hour or until the pumpkin meat is tender. Put the pumpkin on a serving plate (carefully: it's not as firm as it used to be), remove the lid, and eat up. Scoop out some of the cooked pumpkin to serve on the side.