OK so…

I didn’t take this picture, my trusty samsung s4 has decided to stop charging when I plug it in so I had to nick one off the internet. In any case, mine sort of looked like that (except the picture has speck, and I used pancetta)(and mine was better). This lunch I made was practically free as well, given that I only wanted a little pumpkin and one shallot, so my new pal (the organic foods shoppee) just gave it to me. Friends with benefits yo.

This is a super easy dish, and probably one most people haven’t eaten before. Plus it is a gateway pumpkin into the word of cooking with pumpkins, so get on it.

Recipe

Serves 1 (I eat alone a lot…)
200g pumpkin (in season during the winter)
Half shallot
Vegetable stock (just use that gooey thing you find in stores)
50g pancetta
Grated ginger
Parmigiano

Chop off the skin of the pumpkin, fillet out the seedy bit, and chop into 1cm-ish cubes.

In a little olive oil and on medium high heat, fry some shallots briefly and then add the pancetta. When the pancetta is coloured, chuck in the pumpkin cubes and fry for a couple of minutes. Then add a good dose of vegetable stock (enough to happily cover the pumpkin) and the grated ginger. When it’s boiling, lower the heat a bit and cover. Cook until the pumpkin has become very soft (maybe 20 minutes), adding more stock if it starts getting dry. Salt and pepper to taste.

Boil the penne, drain it, and whack it straight into the pumpkin sauce. Keep the heat on under the sauce and cook for a couple of minutes, mixing the pasta vigorously so that it smashes the pumpkin up into a cream. If the sauce is too sticky and dry, add a little more vegetable stock. Serve hot and sprinkle with parmesan.

Note: for the vegetable stock (as done by my new private sicilian cooking instructor, ooooo fancy), I just add water to the pumpkin sauce, and then when the sauce has about 5 minutes left of cooking or so, I add a bit of one of those store brought vegetable stock gooey things, before re-covering the sauce, and letting it dissolve, adding more water if necessary. It seems to me less hassle than preparing a separate pan with stock in it.

Anyway, sorry if this is all getting too cooky for some people. There will be other stories and stuff in time, I feel my fingers pulsing to get going on some rants and reflections.

Also someone let me know if they ever decide to try and make anything here, that would be nice…