The train to nowhere…

The trolley at the Connecticut Trolley Museum rides a track that actually leads to nowhere.  At one time, it was part of the Hartford & Springfield Street Railway, but much of the track was torn up.  Now, the track stops just short of a mysterious baseball field in the woods where some of the great ball players used to come play on (*gasp*) Sundays!  Ah, Connecticut and its weird blue laws.  Not only can we still not purchase alcoholic beverages on Sundays, but back in the day, baseball was verboten on holy days.  And who knows?  Maybe those prohibitionists were right.  Just look at the professional baseball players nowadays.  They all munch on chewing tobacco, swear, make gazillions of dollars, and even scratch their junk on national television.  All of which is completely and utterly unacceptable.

(photo via Connecticut Trolley Museum website)

So, actually, said trolley does in fact make one stop this time of year, pausing in the middle of the woods to eject all of its passengers, young and old.  Fortunately, they only stop the train so that all of the bouncy toddlers and their mommas can hop out into the middle of a “pumpkin patch” (i.e. a fine selection of itty bitty punkins tossed about at random in a grassy field), where each kiddo gets to grab one pumpkin to take home.

Now, once you get home, what you do with it is up to you.  Some of y’all prefer to let the pumpkin slowly rot on the front step until it gets smooshed against your front walls when you fail to open up the door for people wearing masks on Halloween…  Or, you can do what I do, and have pumpkin-pallooza, pumpkinfest, or any other version of pumpkin mania with your little munchkin’s mega-gourd.

Step one: figure out the little dweeb’s latest obsession, then bust out the knife and get to hacking.  Make sure that said obsession makes a grand appearance in your lantern’s decorations.  Why?  Because Sir Topham Hatt said so.  That’s why.  Choo choo!

Step 2) In the spirit of using “all parts” of the animal, I recommend using both the guts and the flesh of Mr. Jack for your fall feasting (especially if it is a sugar pumpkin, which, if you took the trolley to nowhere, it most surely is – little pumpkins for little people, right?).  So, boil down the pumpkin flesh, which you so lovingly scooped out, and rinse off the seeds and get down with some pepitas.

Here’s how I used Thomas the Train Lantern’s innards:

In a separate saucepan, I caramelized some garlic and shallots in olive oil, and then added some white wine, and cooked it down a bit.  Next, I added a grated mini-butternut squash (my garden plants got the dread mold this year, and went and died on me before my squash could grow up to be nice and big, but they are still delicious, even if they are super small) to the pan, along with some salt and cracked pepper.

Finally, I added a bit of browned mild pork sausage (yes, the kind in the tube, ew), the slurry of pumpkin that had been stewing with some veggie broth and rosemary, and grated in a whole bunch of Parmesan cheese.  I then tossed in some whole wheat pasta, a a chunk-o-butter, and some fresh parsley from my garden.  Et voila.  A pumpkiny and squashy cheese festival on my plate.  And yes, both S-Man, S-boy, and I cleaned our plates.  The gooshy warm noodles felt just like a creamy mac ‘n’ cheese, but brought with it all of the seasonal comfort of a cool fall night spent lounging by the fire with your weird cat, who, for some reason, licks all of the hair off of her belly and then lies on the floor on her back to show off her bald spot.  Yes,comfort, indeed.

For the after-dinner snack portion of pumpkin-a-rama, I soaked the seeds in salty water, then dried them off, coated them with olive oil and popped them in a 350 oven, stirring occasionally, for about 20 minutes.  The beauty of homemade pumpkin seeds from a sugar pumpkin is that instead of the tough, chewy stick-like texture that you would get from a bigger pumpkin’s seeds, you end up with a smaller, more tender seed that puffs up into little crispy balloons that crunch lightly when you eat them.

Although I went for the straight-up olive oil and salt version of the pumpkin seed this time (so said toddler could enjoy them, too), I also enjoy using sesame oil, soy sauce, and Secret Spice #2 (a dried chili flake of the most obscene spice level), which gives the pepitas quite a kick.

At Pumpkin Madness, a good time was had by all, except of course, by Mr. Jack himself, who regretted being cut open and eviscerated for our eating pleasure.

The year of the Ox…

… is not this year.  It was actually a couple of years ago.  But 2011 is the year of the rabbit, and rabbit-tail soup just doesn’t cut it.   And I was in the mood for some tail.  Ox tail, that is.

I’ve had it in my freezer for quite some time now, but have admittedly been slacking in the kitchen lately.  Since the bony and cartilaginous tail of a cow (I’m sure that not all so-called ox tail comes from castrated bulls, and I’m sure that a girly cow’s tail tastes pretty much the same as a bull sans cojones) takes at least 3 to 4 hours to get all nice and gooshy, I wasn’t really ready to commit to cooking it until I had a solid chunk of free time.

I lost track of the recipes recommended to me by a friend-of-a-Facebook-friend, so I decided to just go with a recipe that I saw on the Food Network back when I used to have cable TV.   Sunny Anderson has a pretty decent recipe for Oxtail Stew with Butter Beans (dried Lima beans, to be specific), and that is what we enjoyed for supper tonight.

I used the quicky cheater method of rehydrating the dried beans (cover with water, bring to a boil, turn off heat, cover, and let sit for one hour) instead of soaking them overnight.  I also substituted some pimentón (Spanish smoked sweet paprika) for some of the hot paprika called for in the recipe.

After hours of patiently waiting, it is always a bummer when things come out tasting like poo, so I was pleasantly surprised when the stew turned out rich and flavorful, and – cue a chorus of “eewwwwwwwwww” from the squeamish and/or vegetarian sector – full of tender meat that slides right off the vertebrae.