A Fall Festival Food

for my friends i finally was able to make supper this semester, i cooked soup in a pumpkin ... cut the top off the pumpkin and clean the guts out...cut up about half a loaf of french bread and a little block of gruyere cheese into smallish cubes...place in the pumpkin along with a sprinkle of salt and some tarragon and garlic, probably about a teaspoon respectively... add a couple chunks of butter... pour about half to three-quarters cup chicken stock over the stuff already in the pumpkin... fill the pumpkin to about an inch bellow the opening with a combination of milk and half and half... put the cut-off top back on... bake at 400 for about two hours, give or take, (i wasn't paying really close attention to the exact time, but it was probably about that) on a cookie sheet of baking dish (with some sort of sides to prevent dripping, i used a 9x13 cake pan)... make sure you don't let the bottom of the pumpkin burn... stir it a couple of times while baking... take the pumpkin out of the oven stir it really well, make sure to scrape the sides a bit so that you get some chunks of the pumpkin mixed in... don't scrape to deep or your serving dish/pumpkin will get a very messy hole in the side or bottom... put the top of the pumpkin back on till you serve it, the pumpkin will provide some insulation, but serve it within about half an hour to forty-five minutes... the amounts of the ingredients will vary according to the size of the pumpkin...

In the Beginning...

In the beginning there was a group of friends, lets call them the flock... we all had our roles within the group - the pontiff, the scribe, the inquisitor, the artist - and I became the mistress of hospitality. me