In October 1992, we bought a pumpkin.
Now, I don’t remember every gourd-like squash I’ve ever purchased, but this one was special. It wasn’t the first pumpkin I’d ever bought, and it wasn’t the biggest. In fact there was nothing remarkable about it at all, except this: it was the first pumpkin that I ever bought as food.
In the past, I had only procured pumpkins with the intention of carving faces into them. When I shopped for them, I looked for ones that were vaguely evil looking … sinister pumpkins, that looked like they would just as soon shoot me as look at me … soulless pumpkins that exuded quiet rage.
That all changed one afternoon in 1992, when we happened upon a pile of pumpkins at our local vegetable shop. In that moment, it struck me that pumpkins were food too … and remarkably inexpensive food at that (important, as we were saving for our honeymoon). And, as I looked at one pumpkin in particular – a tantalizingly plump and inviting one – I realized that it could feed us for a week.
We bought it, and embarked on what was to become a fun, week-long project: finding as many ways to eat our pumpkin as we could think of (this was in the olden days, and Mosaic was still a year in the future, so we had to rely on our own wits and knowledge). I still remember many of the things we ate that week: roasted pumpkin, pumpkin mash, roasted pumpkin seeds, spicy pumpkin stir fry, pumpkin soup (with a hint of maple and a dash of nutmeg), pumpkin pie and pumpkin quick bread. It fed us for a week, as predicted, and only the peel and stem ended up in the bin – something that felt like an accomplishment, somehow.
This year, there was no jack-o-lantern, but we did buy a little pumpkin, which Bonnie Lee turned into one of the most incredibly moist quick breads I’ve ever had, thanks in part to the addition of okara (soy pulp, a byproduct of making soy milk – more on that magic ingredient another day). The recipe is below…
Insanely moist pumpkin bread
The wet stuff & spices
- 1½ cups pumpkin flesh (roasted then mashed)
- 1 cup okara
- 2 eggs
- ⅔ cups sugar
- ½ cup soy milk (unflavoured, unsweetened)
- ½ cup birch syrup
- ¼ cup honey
- ¼ cup oil
- 2 tsp ginger
- 2 tsp allspice
- 2 tsp nutmeg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp ground cloves
The dry stuff
- 3 cups flour
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 2 tsp salt
- ½ tsp baking powder
Directions
- Preheat your oven to 350℉.
- Grease two loaf pans (we use glass ones).
- Mix the wet stuff and spices in a big bowl.
- Mix the dry stuff in another big bowl.
- Mix the dry stuff into the wet stuff.
- Fill the loaf pans ⅔ full.
- Bake for one hour, or until a wooden skewer or toothpick inserted into the bread comes out clean.
- Let cool for 5 minutes, then remove from pan and cool on rack.
222 million tons 