Remember that jack o’lantern I roasted and squeezed all the water out of?  I took that flesh and made a delicious pureed soup.  You can, too!  Around here, chanterelle mushrooms are in season, one of my favorite times of year for that reason.  I can eat a ridiculous amount of chanterelles.  If they’re around long enough, they’ll go into my dressing on Thanksgiving.  Otherwise, I’ll have to settle for shitakes.  The horror!

The thing about the squeezed out flesh of a pumpkin that size is that when you add liquid back to it, it balloons in volume.  I mashed in some roasted elephant garlic and a stick of butter in a stockpot and just started pouring heavy cream and white wine in.  It just kept absorbing it like a sponge.  I took half of that mash out and used it as a mousse for some beef tenderloin at an event.  There was a gallon of it as mousse.

For the soup, I took the remaining half gallon of mousse and added about a gallon of vegetable stock and some carmelized Walla Walla onion, which I then pulverized together in the VitaMix.  Then I topped that goop with sauteed chanterelles and Oregon white truffle oil.  If there ever was a flavor of the Pacific Northwest, this is it.

Oh, the recipes for all things turkey day.  They are flooding the internet as I type this.  Me?  I start early….with Halloween.  And a giant pumpkin.  I roast the bejeezus out if it.  Why?  To collect all the water, of course.  This isn’t any ordinary water.  It’s pumpkin water.  Golden, magical, nothing else like it in the world, pumpkin water.  It’s my secret to the best vegetable stock ever.  Ever!  And the jack o’lantern pumpkins have the most water in them.

Just cut that sucker in half, get those seeds out, massage the whole thing with a touch of olive oil and stick it in the oven until it starts to collapse.  Every so often, I drain the water that sweats out while it cooks into a bowl.  Afterwards, when the pumpkin has cooled, I squeeze the flesh nearly dry and use it for something else….anything….pie, soup, sauce….and I jar up the water and store it in the fridge for a few days to let the solids settle out.  Then I make stock.  This particular stock, is the base for the best dressing I’ve ever had that I’ve made year after year.  This vegetable stock is so good, in fact, that this year I’m going to roast two pumpkins.  Go me!