smashing pumpkins 261asphyxiation) but clinging tenaciously to life. I was using a truly enormous
butcher knife, but keeping my fingers out of harm’s way. “Mom, this is
safe,” I insisted. “I have good knife skills.”
Where her direct descendants are concerned, my mother’s opinion is
that a person is never too old to lose digits or eyesight in the normal course
of events.
Dad is another story. To be frank, he’s the reason Mom’s worry- skills
remain acutely honed. Naturally he wanted to get in on the act here. “Step
right up!” I said. My father’s career, before he retired, covered most kinds
of emergency surgery imagined in the twentieth century, carried out in
operating rooms that occasionally did not come equipped with electricity.
I wasn’t going to argue with his knife skills.
The pumpkin kept the two of us sawing and sweating for a good thirty
minutes while we made no appreciable progress. Our victim was a really
large pumpkin of the variety called Queensland Blue. The seed catalog
had lured me in with testimonials about its handsome, broad- shouldered
Aussie physique and tasty yellow flesh. Next year, Amadeo’s warty Zucche
de Chioggia would get to vie for the World Cup title of our pumpkin
patch, but for now the Queensland Blue ruled. And this one was not
yielding. My surgical assistant and I sawed some more, taking frequent
breaks to review and strategize. I lusted in my heart after one of those “1
can (15 oz) pumpkin” recipes.
Cooking pumpkin from scratch may not be for the fainthearted, but
it’s generally not that hard. I wasn’t merely trying to hack it to pieces—if
that had been our goal, Dad would have dispatched it in no time fl at. But
I was being girly, insisting on cutting open the top as neatly as possible to
scoop out the seeds and turn the whole thing into a presentable tureen in
which to bake pumpkin soup. I have two different cookbooks that feature
this as a special- guest recipe. Meanwhile we received plenty of advice
from the bystanders (what are families for?), all boiling down to the opin-
ion that it would taste exactly the same if we just smashed it. But this was
a special dinner and I was doing it up right. “You’ll see, go away,” I said
sweetly, waving my knife. I never went to chef school but I know what
they say: presentation, presentation, presentation.
Our occasion was Thanksgiving declared a month early, since all of us