“I’ll make a pumpkin pie and an apple pie”, I said. How hard
could it be, really? I’d just bought
something that was smaller, greener, harder shelled, and more ridged than a
pumpkin at the market the week before, and it was remarkably pumpkin like
inside.
Sundays are market days, and the streets were overflowing
with vendors. I walked down a crowded lane, fruit displays, papaya, pineapple,
granadillas, strawberries, and some fruits I couldn’t even identify forming
haphazard towers. I restacked an orange
I’d knocked to the ground as I brushed past and headed past vegetables:
tomatoes, red peppers, onions, eggplants and broccoli. I wasn’t noticing any
pumpkin-like squash. I headed into the covered market, made a detour to one of
the stalls in the back that sells candles and then zig-zagged through past
kitchen goods, dried peppers, cheap clothes, fresh fish and more
vegetables. Still no sign of pumpkins.
Outside, and close to giving up, I finally spotted something
that looked like a cross between a butternut squash and a watermelon. It just
might do the trick. “What color is it inside?” I asked the lady selling it.
“Black”, she answered off-handedly. “Black?!”
I asked, surprise in my voice, as my mind mentally cataloged every
vegetable dish I’ve ever been served at Guatemalan restaurants and failing to
bring a single black squash to mind. But, she continued to insist that it was
black, and when I told her I was looking for one that was orange inside and
asked if she had any, she pulled another odd shaped winter squash from under
some lettuce and presented it to me. It
looked pretty much like the other. “It might be black, it might be orange,” she
shrugged, then nicked the outside skin, revealing some pale orange flesh
underneath.
I took my pumpkin substitute home and tried to hack it open
with my kitchen knife. When it finally
split, I looked at it in consternation.
Blackish green goop and dark greyish green flesh were what the inner
layer looked like, only the very outside of the squash was orange at all. But, I had a pie to make, so I cut it into
pieces and stuck it on the stove to boil.
As I scooped the softened flesh from the shell to make puree
I almost stopped the experiment then.
The green vastly overwhelmed the orange and this was going to be the
strangest “pumpkin” pie ever. But, I had
just spent an hour buying it, hacking it apart, and boilng it til it was soft
enough, and it smelled and tasted pumpkiny enough so I threw it into the blender,
and continued my recipe anyway.
Several hours later, my no bake, pea-soup “pumpkin” pie was
chilled and ready to go. And green
notwithstanding, I’m thankful that a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg go a
long way towards transforming a mystery squash into a very tasty and almost
convincing “pumpkin” pie.
