The Pumpkin Festival

Hubbub tells us that "18,000 tonnes of edible pumpkin ends up in the bin each year. That's the same weight as 1,500 double-decker buses!"  Back in 2014, Hubbub held their first Pumpkin Rescue to raise awareness of this scary statistic and to encourage people to rethink their attitude to pumpkin waste.  Each year since then I have been invited to be park of the"Great Pumpkin Rescue" helping people learn ways to make the most of their pumpkins and understand that pumpkins are food.

Delicious soup being made today by @AnnaPitt from @LFHW_UK with leftover pumpkin flesh after some incredible carved pumpkins. pic.twitter.com/hN5rTupQjX

— Cogges (@CoggesWitney) October 30, 2016

This year, I was invited to put on my Love Food Hate Waste apron and help out at the pumpkin day at Cogges Manor Farm in Witney to help them make the most of the pumpkins the children were carving to take on their lantern walk.

Pumpkin Day was a lovely family event that I hope will be repeated.  Here's a taste of the day in a lovely video from Box Cottage Photography.



I was making pumpkin soup from the flesh of the pumpkins the children were carving and I toasted the pumpkin seeds. We warmed the soup on the lovely fire in the Victorian kitchen of the manor house.  Lots of people had a cup of the pumpkin soup, sampled pumpkin tray bake cakes and toasted pumpkin seeds and lots of people went away with new ideas about how to make the most of their pumpkins as food.

Plenty of people said they didn't realise that  carving pumpkins were edible. Plenty siad they had no idea that you could toast and eat the seeds.

I was dismayed to hear the culinary experts on Jay Rayner's The Kitchen Cabinet saying that carving pumpkins are for carving not for eating and that they don't taste good.  I disagree.  It is not hard to make a tasty pumpkin soup. Here's my method used at Cogges.

I peeled some onions.  I put the onion skin into a big pan and added a couple of litres of water and brought that to the boil then turned it down to simmer gently while I went foraging in the Cogges walled vegetable garden to see what herbs I could find.  I picked rosemary, thyme, lovage and fennel.  Jess was making mulled cider and so I added the cores from the apples she was peeling into my stock pot of onion skin and added the apple peel to the bowl of pumpkin flesh.

I sweated down the chopped onions in another big pan, and once my stock had taken on a good flavour and lovely reddish brown colour, I added the pumpkin flesh and the herbs into the sweated onions and then poured on some of the stock.  Before whizzing up the soup in a liquidiser I removed the herbs. I often don't do that at home, but you know that thing about mixing colours that you learn in pre-school, it shouldn't be forgotten.  Orange and green make brown. By removing the green herbs, you will get a nicer orange colour when you blend your soup.  Keeping the herbs in there will make the soup turn brown.  However, they will have done their job and added flavour whether you keep them in or take them out.  Once liquidised, I tasted the soup ready to season it.  I added a little sea salt, black pepper and a small quantity of chili powder.

The toasted pumpkin seeds were also sprinkled with a bit of sea salt, black pepper and chili powder.

I was pleasantly surprised how many children liked the pumpkin soup and the toasted seeds. Hopefully next year they will be making the most of their own pumpkins.

Pumpkin and Sage Risotto

I had a bit of pumpkin left from pumpkin number two from the Pitt Pumpkin Patch, so last night I made pumpkin and sage risotto.  Hubbub asked me to share my recipe for their #pumpkinrescue campaign.Truth be told... it was a bit of a 'throw in whatever needs using up' kind of recipe, but broadly speaking this is what it involved.

Ingredients:
A tablespoon of olive oil
1 red onion
1 clove of garlic
Arborio rice (200g)
About a pint of stock
Cubes of pumpkin (about 600g)
Sage leaves - a large handful
Black pepper
Sea salt
Some leftover bits of chicken (about 200g)
Some leftover gammon (about 300g)
 

Firstly, the stock was made from boiling up the chicken carcass from Sunday's roast dinner along with the vegetable peel from Sunday and some that I'd collected last week, which was mainly onion skin and pumpkin skin.

The olive oil was what was left from a pot of olives I was munching as I cooked - you know I hate to waste anything!  This oil had a few herbs in but any olive oil will do.

Chop the red onion and stir fry it in a little olive oil for a few minutes, then chop and add the garlic for a further couple of minutes.  Add the arborio rice and toss it around in the onion and garlic and oil for about a minute.  Add the stock a bit at a time and let the rice soak up the liquid almost entirely before you add the next lot of stock.  I added initially about 3 ladles of stock.  When I added the second lot of stock which was a further three ladles I added in the pumpkin, chicken and gammon, a generous twist of back pepper and about half the sage leaves.  After the second lot of stock was almost soaked up I tasted it and added a little sea salt. I added the rest of the handful of sage leaves along with the last of the stock.

The Pitt Pumpkin Patch

About Hubbub

"Hubbub is taking a fresh look at things we are passionate about: food, fashion, sport, homes and neighbourhoods. Through festivals, events and playful displays we help people come together to enjoy themselves, learn new things and do good.

One thing we want to do is make the most of food and stop edible food from being thrown away. 18,000 tonnes of pumpkin are thrown away at Halloween each year, that is why we have launched our #pumpkinrescue campaign and are hosting the Oxford Pumpkin Festival.

For more information visit our website www.hubbub.org.uk"