Whole Stuffed Roasted Pumpkin

The recipe below is really an outline, and even within the recipe I’ve offered a variety of flavor suggestions as in this meal the pumpkin plays a triple role: cooking vessel, serving bowl, and part of the meal itself. The filling is really up to you! Fill it with cooked rice, farro or bread, add spinach, kale or collards, nuts for a protein and texture addition or if you don’t want it to be a wonderful vegetarian dish, add cooked sausage meat, bacon, cubes of ham, stock or cream. You could go the sweeter route and have apples or dried fruit or feel free to give it an ethnic twist - poblanos, cilantro, roasted tomatoes or maybe go more Indian inspired with curry and spice. The point is to have fun with this.

Choose a Long Island Cheese pumpkin for its creamy flesh or a Rouge Vif d’Etamples/Cinderella pumpkin. The trick is to make enough filling based on your size pumpkin. The recipe below is for a 3lb pumpkin so adjust accordingly. Read all the instructions so you have an idea of what you’re getting yourself into. Keep an eye as it bakes - sometimes they split and you don’t want to have a soup splayed in your oven. Happy eating!

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

• 1 Long Island cheese or Rouge Vif d’Etampes pumpkin, about 3 pounds

• Salt and freshly ground pepper

• 1/4 pound stale bread, sliced and cut into 1/2-inch chunks (or rice, but make sure you add enough liquid for it to cook, but keep in mind the pumpkin will emit moisture)

• 1/4 pound cheese, such as Gruyère, Emmenthal, cheddar, or a combination is even better, cut into 1/2-inch chunks

• 4-8 garlic cloves (to taste), split, germ removed, and coarsely chopped

• 4-8 slices bacon, cooked until crisp, drained, and chopped; or some freshly foraged mushrooms, sautéed in butter (or both!)

• About 1/2 cup snipped fresh chives or 1 bunch sliced green onions (entire bunch except for the top 1/2")

• 1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme (or parsley or basil or sage, depending on your flavor inspirations)

• About 1/3-1/2 cup heavy cream

• Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350° F. Line a baking sheet with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper, or find a Dutch oven with a diameter that’s just a tiny bit larger than your pumpkin. If you bake the pumpkin in a casserole, it will keep its shape, but it might stick to the casserole, so you’ll have to serve it from the pot – which is an appealingly homey way to serve it. If you bake it on a baking sheet, you can present it freestanding, but be careful moving the pumpkin when you take it out of the oven and move it to your table.

Carefully cut a cap out of the top of the pumpkin, working your knife around the top of the pumpkin at a 45-degree angle and cut off enough of the top to make it easy for you to work inside the pumpkin. Clear away the seeds and strings from the cap and from inside the pumpkin. Season the inside of the pumpkin generously with salt and pepper, and put it on the baking sheet or in the pot.

Toss the bread, cheese, garlic, bacon, and herbs together in a bowl. Season with pepper – you probably have enough salt from the bacon and cheese, but taste to be sure – and pack the mix into the pumpkin. The pumpkin should be well filled – you might have a little too much filling, or you might need to add to it. Stir the cream with the nutmeg and some salt and pepper and pour it into the pumpkin. Again, you might have too much or too little – you don’t want the ingredients to swim in cream, but you do want them nicely moistened.

Put the cap in place and bake the pumpkin for about 2 hours – check after 90 minutes – or until everything inside the pumpkin is bubbling and the flesh of the pumpkin is tender enough to be pierced easily with the tip of a knife. Because the pumpkin will have exuded liquid, remove the cap during the last 20 minutes or so, so that the liquid can bake away and the top of the stuffing can brown a little.

When the pumpkin is ready, very carefully – it’s heavy, hot, and wobbly – bring it to the table or transfer it to a platter that you’ll bring to the table.

To serve you can either spoon out portions of the filling, making sure to get a generous amount of pumpkin into the spoonful, or you can dig into the pumpkin with a big spoon, pull the pumpkin meat into the filling, and then mix everything up or you may also be able to cut the stuffed cooked pumpkin into wedges after it cools just a bit.)