Julie Pecenco’s Life in the Little City

I have been listening to the audio book version of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.  It was recommended to me by a friend at church, who told me that I needed to read it.  She was right.  I finished it this afternoon, and cannot recommend it highly enough.  In addition to further opening my eyes to the inherent problems in our industrial-based food system, she has made me want to garden, buy more local produce and make my own cheese.  I have hopes of planting a limited garden in the spring, but I’ve never been much of a gardener, since there is so much else to do in the summer.  The farmer’s market will close at the end of the month, leaving only two weeks of shopping.   In the meanwhile, however, I have a plethora of local produce and spent today cooking up a storm.

I made potato leek soup for dinner, a fall favorite, and also the first meal I cooked for Leah many years ago.  As today is our 9th anniversary, it seemed fitting.  I also sliced, breaded and baked an eggplant for an eggplant parmigiana I plan to make this weekend.  But today’s post is going to be about the most American of vegetables, the pumpkin.  In a previous post, I mentioned buying some pie pumpkins at the farmstand on the corner.  Today I prepared one of them for use in a pie I plan to make for an upcoming event.  I’ve been making my pumpkin pie with fresh pumpkin since I’ve made pumpkin pie, and the results speak for themselves.  Even folks who don’t usually like pumpkin pie often like it with fresh pumpkin.

The process is incredibly simple, yet I’m always explaining it to people.  Indeed, Barbara Kingsolver has a fascinating passage in the aforementioned Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that really resonated with me as I prepared to cook a simple little pumpkin.

For I opened our local paper to the food section and found a colorful two-page spread under the headline “Pumpkin Possibilities.”  Pumpkin Curry Soup, Pumpkin Satay!  The food writer urged us to think past pie and really dig into this vitamin rich vegetable.  I was excited.  We’d grown three kinds of pumpkins that were now lodged into our root cellar and piled on the back steps.  I was planning a special meal for a family gathering on the weekend.  I turned a page to find the recipes.

As I looked then over, Devil sneered at Angel and kicked butt.  Every single recipe started with the same ingredient: “I can (15 oz) pumpkin.”

I could see the shopping lists now:
1 can pumpkin (for curry soup)
1 of those big orangey things (for doorstep).

Come on, people.  Doesn’t anybody remember how to take a big old knife, whack open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and bake it?  We can carve a face onto it, but can’t draw and quarter it?  Are we not a nation known worldwide for our cultural zest for blowing up flesh, on movie and video screens and/or armed conflict?  Are we in actual fact too squeamish to stab a large knife into a pumpkin?  Wait till our enemies find out.

So here, is several easy steps, is my method for getting something far better than that 15 oz can.

Step 1: Cut the pumpkin in half.  I use a chef’s knife for this job, and a little pie pumpkin rarely requires all that much “whacking.”

Step 2: Scoop out the seeds.  If you’ve ever carved a jack-o-lantern, this should be self explanatory.  I find that a large scalloped edge serving spoon works ideally for this purpose, but use whatever works best for you.  If you plan to save the seeds, set them aside and wash them.  If not, put them in the compost with all of the other pumpkin guts.

Step 3: Have your oven preheated to 350°F to 450°F.  The lower the temperature, the longer it will need to cook.  I set mine somewhere around 400°F today (but our oven is slow).  Line a baking sheet with foil (trust me on this one – you don’t want to scrub this pan all night) and coat the foil with a thin coating of oil.  I use canola oil; avoid something with a strong flavor like olive oil.

Step 4:  Put the hollowed pumpkin halves face down onto the pan and cook for several hours.  The exact time is going to depend on the size of the pumpkins, the temperature of your oven, and other factors.  This isn’t baking; it’s not rocket science.

Step 5:  When the pumpkin is mushy, remove it from the oven.  Don’t worry about the skin; you’re not using that part anyway.

Step 6: Scrape the pumpkin flesh away from the skin.  Sometimes the skin will lift right off, other times you’ll have to do a little more work.  Cut away any burnt area on the edges.  Dump the skin into the compost bucket and the foil into the trash.

Step 7: Put the pumpkin flesh into a colander inside of a bowl, and mash it up using a fork or potato masher.  Drain the liquid from the bowl.  Place the colander/bowl setup into the refrigerator and allow it to drain for several days.  It’s then ready to be used or frozen.  I find that one pie pumpkin is just about the perfect amount for one 9-inch pie (my recipe calls for two cups of pumpkin.)

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We have lived here in Oneonta for over three years now, and have lacked a proper clothesline for that entire time.  There’s a small rope strung on the back porch, and we keep a folding drying rack in the basement next to the washer and dryer, but for the most part, we’ve had to use the dryer to dry our clothes.  When we first moved into the house, I bought a retractable clothesline, like the one we’d had at our previous house.  Alas, it was too short to span the distance between any appropriate fixed objects in the backyard, and I didn’t really want to dig holes and install poles, so the clothesline sits in a box untouched.

With the costs of energy (and everything else) skyrocketing, and a renewed committment to living a sustainable lifestyle spurring me to action, I decided that it was high time I rigged up a clothesline.  I still wasn’t keen on the work and cost involved with putting in posts, and I would have had to call the power company to mark the spots I couldn’t dig.  In my research this morning, I stumbled across the perfect solution in a random blog called Reflections on an Empty Nest.  Barb, the author, described her solution for an easy, and removeable, clothesline.  It was the best solution for my needs, especially when Home Depot didn’t have any clothesline kits with pulleys.  Total cost for the project was around $22, and I could have saved about $6 by buying only 100 ft of rope instead of 200 ft.

Materials:

• Clothesline rope (distance depends on your needs) – $13.97
• Eye Bolt – $1.97 for a pack of 2
• Utility Snap Hook – $2.69
• Rope cleat – $1.93

The eyebolt went into a tree at the back of the yard, the best location for our space.  I attatched the cleat to the back wall of the house on the porch.  I pulled out my knot book (since I really know squat about knots) and used a double hitch to attach one end of the rope to the snap hook.  I then snapped the hook onto the eye bolt, and wrapped the other end of the rope around the cleat mounted on the back porch.  The whole process took maybe an hour, and much of that time was dragging around extension cords for my drill (the charger for the cordless one died – argh!) and untangling the extra rope.

A few hours later, we had some dry linens, and I disconnected the snap hook from the tree, wound up the rope, and stored it all on the porch.  Many thanks to Barb from Reflections on an Empty Nest for the idea.

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Part 2 of the big weekend in the little city was the 15th annual Pit Run, a 10k race run each year in a memory of Ricky J. “Pit” Parisian, a New York State Trooper who was killed trying to stop an armed robbery in 1994.  Leah started running again this summer, and the Pit Run was her goal, despite the fact that she hadn’t run this far since high school.  She kept running, and today was there at the starting line on a chilly but othewise gorgeous October morning.

My adventures in running this summer were brief, and ended in physical therapy, so I rode my bike down to the park to keep Leah company, and then zipped around town to cheer her on and take pictures at various locations along the route.  Leah finished the race looking good, having completed the entire course without walking, even on the killer hill up to SUNY Oneonta, and came in well under her expected time.  So here’s a big “hurrah!” for Leah on her first Pit Run.

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It was a big weekend here in the little city, with all sorts of things going on. Yesterday was the Oneonta Centennial parade, part of a year long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the city’s charter. The organizers hoped to make it the largest parade ever held in Oneonta. Predications were that the parade would last an hour, which is pretty impressive when most parades in the city last about ten minutes. UUSO organized a large group, but Leah and I were committed to marching with our local chapter of P-FLAG. We were near the end of the line-up, and it took over two hours for us to even get out onto the parade route. My legs were so tired from all the standing as we waited that it was almost hard to walk. But once we finally got moving, it was fun and we were glad to be out there. Thanks to the UU crowd, who had long since finished marching and joined the crowd to watch the rest of the parade, we had supporters scattered along the route to cheer us on, plus various other folks, some we didn’t even know, thanking us for being there.

It made me realize how important it was for us to be out there marching, with our banner and rainbow flags, letting people know that we are there even in this small and fairly rural area.

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Okay, so I don’t really do “heroes” and I’ve never even met him, but Russ Roca, who bills himself as the “Eco-Friendly Bicycling Photographer,” is an inspiration to me.  He is a car-free photographer out on the West Coast who does all of his travel – including to and from jobs – via bicycle and public transportation.  With several cargo bikes in his fleet, he’s carried everything from photo gear to a giant inflatable earth to cement pilings on his bicycles.  Between the cycling and his photography, he’s an example I strive to emulate.

As I mentioned in a previous post, public transportation here in Oneonta will only get one so far.  Living in a sparsely populated area also means that I often have to travel fairly far for jobs.  In the past few months, I’ve switched most of my in-town travel to the bicycle, but it is work related locomotion that usually ends up with me behind the wheel.  Yesterday however, I booked a last minute job to photograph the exterior of a local business that was going up for sale.  As it happens, it was less that a mile and a half away, and I didn’t need much gear, so my choice was between walking and riding.  I had a busy day ahead of me with several other appointments, so I hopped on the bike, rode over, took my shots, and headed home.  The sun even came out while I was shooting, helping provide some contrast on what had been a wet and overcast morning.  I’ll likely never be a car-free photographer here in the little city, but I’ll be doing my best to incorporate my car-lite philosophy into my photography business.

On another note, it’s most definitely autumn here in upstate New York.  Though I’d hoped the warm weather would stick around a bit longer, the temperatures have dropped and the rain has been falling.  The foliage is a blaze of color (we’re getting close to peak color here in the foothills of the Catskills) and the leaves have been raining down.  The farm stands are piled high with pumpkins; I stopped on my way home from an appointment last week and picked up a couple of pie pumpkins.  I’ve been keeping my panniers on my bike for just this sort of thing.  I’ve been making pumpkin pie from fresh pumpkins for years now, and there’s nothing quite like it, especially now that I grate the nutmeg myself too.

We certainly are blessed with dazzling autumns here, even if it does mean that the dark and cold days of winter are around the corner.  For now, the view is spectacular, and the riding is good (albeit windy.)

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