Another friend on Blipfoto, dis..dat….d’udda, sent me seeds last year of a Chilean variety of pumpkin she calls, simply, Smashing. This autumn we harvest three of these and today Lo Jardinièr cooked the first one. Of course, we’ve saved the seeds for next year.
According to dis…dat…d’udda these are much used in Chile in many different dishes – especially in stews or mashed with potatoes – and we decided to try one of our standard pumpkin recipes with it. Lo Jardinièr cut half of it into chunks and roasted them for about an hour in olive oil with a good pinch of coarse sea salt. When the pieces were nicely browned he puréed them with a couple of cloves of garlic, put the purée in an oven-proof dish, crumbled some bleu d’Auvergne cheese on top and put it back in the oven for about ten minutes and then briefly under the grill to brown the cheese. All we needed with this for a warming, cheering lunch on a grey day was a baguette. And the pumpkin was indeed smashing – with a very concentrated almost spicy flavour. The other half is waiting to be made into soup.
olivesandartichokes 
oh, stop making me hungry, i’m trying to read about kripke’s theory of naming and now all i can think about is pumpkins – for some reason didn’t have any this halloween, though i did have butternut squash soup for lunch today – with bagel rather than baguette (as the baguettes someone brought me from paris last friday were somewhat . . . dur)
I love the idea of bleu d’Auvergne with pumpkin.
This is a lovely looking pumpkin dish and the story of you acquiring the seeds is impressive too. I need to keep experimenting until i find one that is suited to this environment .. this year was not a good year for our pumpkins! c
Great pictures!
Sounds so good – blue cheese is sooo good! Reminds me a little of a Hugh F-W recipe with a pumpkin and cheese which he makes a kind of soup out of.