When a friend who lives on her own underwent day surgery early last autumn, her many friends and acquaintances stepped in to help. Her recuperation progressed well and, at the end of October, she hosted a Sunday afternoon tea to thank everyone. Her sister Sandy and brother-in-law Robert came from Courtenay to help.
I arrived to find a聽room full of chatting people. Plates of appealing savoury finger foods were laid out on a dinner table and various sweets were arrayed on nearby coffee tables. Among the dessert items was a pumpkin pie that Sandy had made, using a hazelnut crust.
Until then, I鈥檇 been under the illusion that my pumpkin pie recipe was the best. Wrong. Sandy鈥檚 pie was darker and more deeply rich in flavour. I spoke with her about the recipe, which she found after a quick search through her sister鈥檚 cookbooks in a duplicate copy of a publication she had at home.
Curiously, the recipe ingredients and their proportions were almost the same as in my recipe, with a few tweaks. Her version uses a sugar called Rapadura, which is simply dehydrated sugar cane juice. It鈥檚 an entirely unrefined sugar. Some health food stores have it.
If I may indulge in a little reminiscing here, the sugar in the recipe reminded me of time spent in聽Egypt during my youthful travelling years. The sidewalk juice bars in Cairo had lengths of sugar cane that were run through rollers to extract the juice, which was surprisingly not very sweet, just deliciously caramel flavoured.
Sandy鈥檚 recipe calls for a tablespoon of freshly grated ginger root, rather than the mere quarter-teaspoon of powdered ginger in my recipe. Other additions are the grated rind of one lemon and two tablespoons of brandy. Instead of聽whole milk, this version of the聽pie uses cr猫me fra卯che.
Sandy noted these differences, but emphasized that the rich quality of the pie filling was due almost entirely to the squash she uses instead of pumpkin. This squash, one she and her friends grow and love, is a kabocha type called Black Forest. Sandy has grown it since buying seeds from a Full Circle Seeds booth at a Seedy Saturday event.
The Full Circle website describes Black Forest as a dark green squash weighing three to four pounds, with deep orange flesh that is medium dry and sweet. This is a popular squash for its strong yet sweet flavour and fluffy texture, somewhat like chestnuts.
Salt Spring Seeds also lists Black Forest, which they note is聽a classic Japanese squash, smaller than the typical kabocha. The flesh is described as sweet, rich, dark orange and delicious.
Another source for this squash is Johnny鈥檚 Selected Seeds, whose vast array of leafy greens and salad blends are favourites of growers at聽my聽local farmers鈥� market.
Kabocha squash, also known as Japanese pumpkin, is prized for the finely聽grained texture of the flesh and its聽sweet, rich, buttery flavour that some聽find similar to sweet potato and pumpkin.
Eating light. I emerged from the turkey-stuffing, pumpkin-pie and chocolate-truffle food fog of Christmas sensing a聽need for simple, cleansing foods. As holiday company left, I wandered into the聽garden and contemplated the root vegetable plot,聽still housing roots safely stored underground.
There it was: Tummy-scrubbing food 鈥� carrots, beets, daikon (winter) radishes.
My usual light-eating meal is a salad of mixed leafy greens with added toasted nuts and seeds, chopped apple, and parmesan or feta cheese. For this post-Christmas meal, I created a variation by first making a dressing of freshly squeezed mandarin orange juice mixed with olive oil, salt and pepper, Dijon mustard and grated ginger root.
Into the dressing went chopped lettuce and bok choy, and grated beet, carrot and聽daikon, tossed together and topped with freshly grated parmesan. It was a refreshing meal, full of crunch and flavour, and a聽virtuous change from the heavier, more indulgent fare of the holiday season.
GARDEN EVENT
View Royal meeting. The View Royal Garden Club will meet on Wednesday, Jan. 22, at 7:30 p.m. in Wheeley Hall behind Esquimalt United Church, 500 Admirals Rd. Entrance is off Lyall St. Andy MacKinnon, a professional forester, will present Cool Plants and their Fungal Friends. The evening will also feature a judged mini show of exhibits from members鈥� gardens and a sales table with plants and garden items. Non-member drop-in fee $5. .
