Tradition

A few years ago I got a recipe for stuffed pumpkin from a story I heard on the radio. I made it for family dinner that year, and it's become one of my favorite fall recipes. It's really easy to switch up (I've substituted sausage for the bacon, used different kinds of cheese, added cranberries and chopped apples, changed up the spices), and hard to get wrong because you don't have to get the proportions exactly right for it to turn out. And it's hearty and delicious and tastes like fall.

Brian's introduction to the recipe was last year, and he loved it. So this year, when we came across some sugar pumpkins for a dollar each at the BYU Farmers Market, he was all for making stuffed pumpkins again.

(Picture courtesy of NPR)

We've had the pumpkins for almost two weeks now, and I finally got around to stuffing and baking them last night. The stuffed pumpkins are delicious, but they're a bit of a production. The filling is super easy, but it's a hassle to scrape out the inside of the pumpkin, and it takes 90 minutes to 2 hours to bake. While Brian was scraping out a pumpkin and I was assembling the filling ingredients, I commented that this was a once-a-year dish, and Brian said something about this being the third year in a row I'd made it, and I really loved the idea of doing this every year at Halloween, and suddenly a family tradition was born.

Because we're only in our second year of marriage, and our first year of parenthood, we don't have many established traditions. But it's exciting to realize that this is the time that traditions begin, because this is the year we begin to repeat activities we enjoyed the first time around. Last night when stuffed pumpkin became tradition, it felt like something a little outside of us. It wasn't a deliberate move on our part, it just kind of happened and I knew it was going to be a tradition for years to come. That's what's exciting - it feels like our family traditions are around the corner, maybe a few months or a few years down the road, and we'll discover them along the way.

Stuffed Pumpkin

1 baking pumpkin (the smaller sugar pumpkins, not the big jack-o-lantern pumpkins)
1/4 lb. stale bread, cut into 1- or 1/2-inch chunks
1/4 lb. cheese, cut into 1/2-inch chunks (I like to use Muenster)
2-4 garlic cloves, crushed
4-6 strips of bacon, cooked until crisp, drained and chopped
1/4 cup sliced green onions or 1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme
1/3 cup cream

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut a cap out of the top of the pumpkin and remove seeds and strings from the cap and from the inside of the pumpkin. Season the inside of the pumpkin with salt and pepper and put it on a baking sheet or in a casserole dish.

Toss the bread, cheese, garlic, bacon, and herbs together in a bowl. Season with pepper 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.

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. You may want to 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, carefully, 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, spoon out portions of the filling, scraping the sides of the pumpkin to make sure you get plenty of pumpkin in each serving.