In Which Dinner is in a Pumpkin

On Sunday, the very day of Halloween, we had our second dinner in a pumpkin and it turned out great. And this year we had a couple of friends over to help us eat it so now there is slightly less for us to eat as leftovers all week. A lot of people that we have mentioned this dinner to have been kind of perplexed and interested in it so I thought I would explain the process here.

My first dinner in a pumpkin was made by my then roommate, Comrade Cox in 2008. Last year I decided to try it myself since it seemed pretty straight forward. And when I say "seemed" I mean "is." So, here is the process.

You buy yourself a pumpkin. You don't want a gigantic pumpkin because it has to cook and also it has to fit in the oven. I have had good luck with a nice mid-sized pumpkin that is more tall than it is wide. You clean it out all nice, and put the seeds aside for baking later--or for just sitting on the counter, like I'm doing this year.

So then you need to fill it! I follow Comrade Cox's recipe, which is as follows:
-Sausage: one of those Jimmy Dean kinds of sausage that comes in the fat tube.
-6 cups of cooked rice
-1 can of cream of mushroom soup
-1 can of cream of chicken soup
-1/2 cup soy sauce
-1 small onion, all chopped up
-A few stalks of celery, all chopped up. You want about as much celery as you have onion, unless you really like celery. Or onion.

All you do is cook the sausage with the vegetables until it's done, mix in everything else and then put it in the pumpkin! If the pumpkin doesn't quite hold it all (you want some space), everything is cooked so you can just eat it on its own. There is NO waste, Siegfried!*Put the lid back on the pumpkin, put the whole thing on a baking sheet and stick it in a 375 degree oven for 2 hours.
My pumpkins have not needed quite 2 hours, more like 1 and 45 minutes or so. Anyway, whenever it is done, you get a strong man to get it out of the oven for you.Then you just dish it out, scraping out pumpkin with the other stuff, and you eat, eat, eat until you can eat no more! And when you can't eat anymore, you dig everything out and throw what's left of the pumpkin away. Food doesn't get more seasonal than this!

*That one's for you, Marcue...can you place the reference?