Ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties...

...and things that go bump in the night! It's that time of year. Pumpkins everywhere, our neighbors' black cats on the prowl, skeletons dangling from porches... and the Christmas displays going up in the big-box stores. I, along with apparently everyone else, detest the earlier and earlier start to the annual force-feeding of consumerism that has become Christmas. Somebody's got to be buying the stuff, though, nurturing the greed that perpetuates the earlier and earlier force-feeding... 

But enough of that. Happily, we're relatively immune to it in our little community. We're immersed in things autumnal -- Hallowe'en, Dia de los Muertos, sunny beaches after the summer fog...

.. and of course the Brussels sprout harvest. The sprouts grow along the plant's stem, the bulging little balls poking out all the way down almost to the ground.

The sprout fields are a sea of fluffy leaves, stretching across our fertile bench of land between mountain and ocean.

 To harvest the sprouts, the farmers strip the leaves away, then cut the stems and strip the sprouts off.

A new trend is to sell the whole sprout stalk. That can be a lot of sprouts.

You know how sprouts smell when they're cooking, kind of... pungent? Well, they smell a little that way when they're growing, too. When we were kids passing a sprout field, the cool joke in the car was "who farted?!"



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A few days ago I looked through my collection of New Yorker covers (yes, this proud native Californian has taken the New Yorker since the '70s) and found a couple of classic Hallowe'en covers by the inimitable Charles Addams.

This one appeared on the October 31, 1988 cover... a month after Charles Addams' passing on September 29, 1988. I think he must have loved that.

Pumpkin madness

It's October on the central California coast, and pumpkins are everywhere. I mean, everywhere. These are in a hilly field near our home in Moss Beach... the view is looking east, with the Santa Cruz mountain range in the distance. When Wm. took this photo, we could hear the Pacific Ocean pounding heavily behind us to the west. A storm was out at sea, moving in.
















October on the Coastside means the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. Thousands and thousands of people come for the parade, which features the giant pumpkin. The monster in this photo topped 1600 pounds. Really, shouldn't the winning pumpkin be orange? I think that should be one of the rules......

I'm thinking about pumpkin pasta, with all this pumpkin-ness. Not pasta stuffed with pumpkin, but with pumpkin right in the dough, along with the flour and eggs. I use 2 eggs, a half-cup of pureed pumpkin (sugar pie variety) or squash (try kabocha) and enough flour for a 3-egg pasta... 3 cups or so, depending. Maybe a grinding or two of pepper in the dough.

And how about a nice walnut sauce to top that beautiful golden pasta?

Nice Walnut Sauce for Pasta

2 cups walnuts
boiling water
pinch salt
a clove of garlic
a few leaves marjoram
1 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated

1. Soak the walnuts in the boiling water for half an hour or so.
2. Drain the walnuts and zing them in a food processor with a little salt, the clove of garlic, and the marjoram; make a smooth paste.
3. Add the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and zing some more. Right! It's pesto we're doing here. (Pestare means to pound, and the right way is to pound it all in a mortar; zinging in the processor is easier, though, no?)
4. Thin with hot pasta-cooking water before serving, to make the sauce creamy and smooth.