Ann has been doing a fantastic job of knocking out these Cooking Wild in Missouri recipes, much to my eating pleasure. But it was about time I took a turn in the kitchen. And I had just the recipe in mind that I wanted to do. This story really starts with the Columbia Farmers’ Market, and one of my favorite things: a deal. We were shopping for pumpkins two days before Halloween, not bad for us. There were plenty of big, beautiful pumpkins at the farmers’ market, priced at $4, or three for $10. Each of my two boys wanted his own, so then for only $2 more I could buy a fantastic, locally grown pumpkin. I couldn’t pass that up. I let Oliver do the picking, and he always goes for big, and with some help we got the pumpkins to the car.
Later that day I helped the boys carve them up, with the fairly traditional scariest faces they could muster. Each boy did one, and although they encouraged me to do my own, I didn’t take time to do so. Which left us with one pumpkin post-Halloween.
I had spotted the recipe in the book for venison stew in a pumpkin, but I was a little worried. We didn’t have any venison left from last season, and this deer season wasn’t here yet. How long would the pumpkin keep? Then I read in the book that the author had kept her’s from the fall until she used in February. That encouraged me - surely I’d have a deer before then.
Opening day of firearms deer season was successful for me, and the day after Thanksgiving I picked up the venison from my Dad, who had picked up his and mine from the processer at Linn. Now I was ready to go.
So even though we had a big crowd at our house for Thanksgiving, and for dinner the day after Thanksgiving, I didn’t really want to keep my venison pumpkin to myself. My friend and neighbor Robert has been following the blog, so I invited him and his family, who boys are friends with my boys, over for dinner Sunday night.
It’s a pretty hardy recipe, that starts with two pounds of venison stew meat, but with Robert’s family plus mine I would be feeding 10, so hearty is good. I started off browning the stew meat on the stove top, then added the rest of the ingredients, except the tomato. I then transferred the pot to the woodstove. I had a raging fire going and it was boiling harder than I wanted it to on the woodstove, so I set a metal trivet between the pot and the stove, then it simmered just right.
This gave me a couple hours to go back to a painting project in our bathroom, and then it was back to the kitchen. I cut the top of the pumpkin and pulled out the innards like we were going to be carving another jack o lantern, and then I transferred the stew from the pot to the pumpkin.
I’ve made soup in a pumpkin before, but it was mushroom soup in a smaller pumpkin, and I didn’t bake it as long. This would be different.
The book says to put the top back on the pumpkin, but my pumpkin was too big so this wasn’t possible. The book also says to put the pumkin in a baking dish, but again, my pumpkin was too big, The best I could do was put a cookie sheet under it. It baked for two hours, and toward the end of that time I put the top in the oven beside it, so the color change would be similar.
When it came time to remove the pumpkin, I couldn’t pick it up by the cookie sheet, because it was too flimsy and the pumpkin was too heavy. So I got out our big cutting board that we had just used for serving turkey and put it on the floor next to the oven. Then I kneeled down and prepared to lift the pumpkin from the oven. I advised Oliver to stand back.
Disaster! A rupture occurred in the bottom of the pumpkin! Stew was spewing on my oven door! I quickly placed the pumpkin on the cutting board.
Then nothing. Apparently it had just been a small fissure that occurred when I lifted the pumpkin. When I sit it down on the board the leaking stopped. Fortunately there is a little trough that goes around the cutting board, so it caught some of the spill. Quite a bit got on the oven door, and made it to the floor, but half a roll of paper towels later, Oliver and I had most of it cleaned up, and oven was ready for Ann to make dessert. The spilled stew made a mess, but in terms of real quantity we didn’t lose much, and still had a lot of leftovers.
We served the stew out of the pumpkin with no more leaks, but post dinner I noticed the pumpkin was starting to slump quite a bit. Two hours may be too much in a convection oven.
I like stews, and have made a lot of them, both by recipes and by winging it. This stew is superior to any that I’ve made before. Oddball ingredients like dried apricots really add to its complexity of flavors, and I think the key ingredient was the coconut. The stew wasn’t a favorite among the kids, but I think I’ll make it again, with or without a pumpkin.
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