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.

Time for walnuts!

September, and the walnut trees are heavy with their fat green-hulled nuts. When I was growing up on our ranch in California's Santa Clara Valley we grew three varieties of walnuts: Frankettes, small and oblong with hard-to-crack shells; Eurekas, large and round with hard-to-crack shells; and Mayettes, small and round with shells that were soft enough for me to crack with my bare hands.

I took this picture in late summer 1962, looking east from the top of our ranch tankhouse over a sea of prune and walnut trees, toward the golden, oak-studded hills.

In late September or early October, depending on the weather, the thick green hulls began to crack as the walnuts ripened. The ripe nuts fell and we gathered and hulled them, getting green-black stains under our fingernails and burnishing our fingers deep walnut.
We spread the hulled walnuts on big redwood trays in the sun to dry. (The structure in the photo is the drying-tray shed, where the trays were kept between harvests.)

After the nuts had sunbathed for a few days, Dad would test a couple of them for dryness by breaking them open and checking the membrane that divides the sections of the nut. If the membranes crackled, the nuts were dry.



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“You know how to crack walnuts, don’t you?” Dad asked me one day, grinning. “With a nutcracker?” I replied, taking the bait. “Well no,” he said, “here’s what you do...”

Take a walnut and rest it on a seam on a hard surface. With a small hammer, tap the walnut on the seam a couple times, then turn it over and tap it on the seam on the other side. Set the walnut on the stem end, and tap tap on the pointed end.

It’ll break right in two, and you can use a nut pick to pull out the perfect halves. Not only do you have perfect walnut halves for each nut, you have two perfect shell halves. Make Thumbelina a little boat—glue in a toothpick mast and yardarm, then use toilet paper to make a sail.

Use the perfect walnut halves to make...
Mom's Sugared Walnuts

1 cup sugar
dash salt
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup water
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups walnut halves

1. Melt the sugar, spices, and water over a slow fire, until dissolved; bring to a boil and cook until the syrup threads.
2. Remove from the fire, add vanilla nuts, and stir well until the mass sugars.
3. Turn out onto a buttered cookie sheet and cool.
4. Break apart with a fork or chopsticks and store airtight.