Somebody Take This Obese Pumpkin, Please!

It's the time of year when gourds start to take over, spilling from the oven and dinner plate onto people's front porches and various home display nooks. And the grocery stores start getting inspired with their gigantic pumpkin and yellow-and-green warty gourd displays. Around Berkeley and Oakland, I've seen a number of obese pumpkins basking in their orange Jabba the Hutt folds at the Berkeley Bowl, out in front of Sweet Adeline's cafe, and some random restaurants along Telegraph that I zoomed past too quickly to remember.

People grow these enormous pumpkins, win prizes at county fairs, proudly display their overgrown vegetable progeny in a blaze of harvest glory. And then the excitement fades and reality sets in. You have an enormous, unwieldy pumpkin that no one is going to eat, that will grow moldy and disgusting, and that you will have to hack at with a chainsaw before it'll fit into your green bin.

The photo above comes from a Craigslist post from a San Francisco family that won this 160-lb. pumpkin for correctly guessing its weight and, now that the euphoria of that victory has shriveled to a wizened tendril, are trying to pawn off this nuisance on someone else. Here's the ad:

160 lb pumpkin -- who can resist?

Date: 2012-11-13, 8:45PM
We won this pumpkin in a contest for correctly guessing its weight.
We've enjoyed having it for the past month, but now it's time to let go.
Wouldn't necessarily suggest eating it, but great for use for decorative, artistic, or composting purposes.
Yours for free if you'd like to come pick it up. I'll help you carry it to your car.
We're near Japantown.


The ad is still live as of this posting (it's here!), so I hope I am doing a public service by spreading the news to someone who might want this bloated orange monster.  "Who can resist?" I imagine the family members smiling weakly, trying to convince you of the irresistible allure of the 160-lb pumpkin that's been decaying in their house for a month already and that they are begging you to take off their hands. "I'll help you carry it to your car." Please help. SOS.

While I'm on the topic of ornamental squash, I'd like to remind you that it's the time of the year when we gather round and reread my all-time favorite McSweeney's Internet Tendency column, "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers." by Colin Nissan. It begins:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. 

It continues in pretty much the same vein, until the cumulative effect of the macho-dude swearing and swagger to describe such Martha Stewart passions for seasonal decor makes me laugh so hard I cry, every time. I especially love the gourd necklace.

When it rains it pours, and the veggie posts keep coming tonight after two months of silence. (It's been a busy few months.) It must be the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and an early T-day feast last Sunday that got me thinking about vegetables again. Enjoy your feasts and don't forget to include some weird vegetables.

And thanks to Amaranth Gadberry for foraging this amazing pumpkin plea from the brambles of Craigslist. Lastly, I leave you with some choice obese pumpkin photos culled from the Internet. While 160 lbs might seem heavy to you, some of these award winners weigh in the area of 1,300 pounds or MORE. Yikes. And yes, that is a man riding in a pumpkin boat.

Pumpkin Play Time

This spooky scary Halloweeny edition of Weird Vegetables is brought to you by the spookiest scariest social networking interface around: Facebook!

While I lay in bed with a monster cold, my friends fell to their pre-Halloween pumpkin productions with admirable industry, which I was able to witness from a prone position via my laptop.

High school homie Danny Murphy, so true an S.F. Giants fan he probably bleeds orange and black, carved this SF logo in honor of the current magical baseball postseason.

Meanwhile, Char Booth of black-eyed peas fame, posted this oatmeal-in-a-pumpkin breakfast special:

To make your own, scoop out that pumpkin, then toss in these ingredients:
oats, grated pears/apples, raisins, fruit compote, soymilk or water, nutmeg, cinnamon, pinch o' salt. The oatmeal to liquid should be about 1:2 (so 1/2 cup oatmeal would be a little over a cup of water or soymilk)

Then bake at 375-400 for an hour or so. Put the cover on for the first half and then let it breathe. You can then use the baked pumpkin meat for pie, bread, or other pumpkin-based treats. Char writes, "the original idea came from boingboing, who got a diff recipe from another food blog... theirs was a bit sugarcore for me." Sugarcore's a bit freaky to me too--we like to keep it straightveg over here, SxV (though preferring veggies to sugar is always a bit queer).

Happy Halloween! Go GIANTS!!

Paper delay!

Hello brave vegetable lovers! If anyone is running around the frozen streets of San Francisco looking for the McSweeney's newspaper, the SF Panorama, it's been delayed a few hours (you can't rush wildly ambitious 3-lb. "newspapers"). So my shift on the corner at 24th St. and Sanchez is looking more like early afternoon. In the meantime, amuse yourself with this primly festive piece on decorative gourds from McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Pumpkin Dance

Really, you should go out tonight. Finding a costume is not that complicated. Just find a black shirt and leggings, grab someone's front porch jack-o-lantern to strap onto your face, et voila! Halloween! Someone will throw candy your way, I promise.

This Omaha news station knows how to start a partay. I'm fascinated by how clearly enunciated all the dance moves are and also by the curious androgyny of the dancer--big ham fists (note the wedding ring), broad shoulders, yet such delicate legs, and the lumpish hint of chicken hormone breasts.

I owe this incredible treasure to the Internet foraging skills of the musically, linguistically, comedically gifted Kerry McLaughlin, who contributes to many blogs and produces episodes for the TV arm of XLR8R magazine.

Elmo's Butchered Pumpkin Face

Last week I left New York to face its impending winter alone and escaped to the perma-summer of Los Angeles on the weekend for a friend's wedding and to visit my sister's family. While driving through Echo Park on our way to hike in the hills near the Griffith Observatory and ogle the Hollywood sign, then pick up some really expensive coffee beans that a roast-obsessed San Francisco friend requested I bring him from Intelligentsia in Silver Lake, my friend John--a passionate meat lover--asked if there was any vegetable equivalent for butchering.

I think of the butcher as someone who handles and dresses dead animals and who acts as a skilled intermediary between cooks and their meat because the task of division and preparation is labor-intensive, often unpleasant, and takes some amount of training and talent to perform. But I couldn't think of any vegetable whose parts are parceled out to be sold in quite as elaborate a way as pigs or cows. A "vegetable butcher"-themed Google search turned up Bloody Butcher corn, perhaps the most frightening heirloom variety name I have yet encountered, as well as this delightfully creepy children's illustration by Michael Lauritano:


What we do to pumpkins and other large winter squash, especially in the weeks leading up to Halloween, seems to come closest to what might be called vegetable butchering. Many of us remain amateur carvers, though, hacking into these forbidding vegetable surfaces with much trepidation and trial and error, and more often for recreation and decoration than to eat them.

In our efforts to be festive, we take sharp knives and carefully cut into their rotund exoskeletons, revealing their tangled mass of innards.

Then we reach our hands in and swirl them around to remove the goopy guts.


Some additional knifework or spoon action clears the last of the seeds and spaghetti entrails.



Then the less knife-sure of us take a Sharpie to the pumpkin face in order to better carve out a creaturely visage. My twin nieces, whom I nicknamed Pumpkin and Peanut for their relative shapes and sizes when they were first born, are in love with Sesame Street's Elmo, like most American two-and-a-half year olds who watch TV, so my sister and I decided to attempt an orange homage to this little red giggle monster. I drew a test Elmo on our newspaper scrap and plotted a carving strategy but deferred to my sister for the actual drawing on the pumpkin.

"Don't worry, I've drawn Elmo sooooo many times."



Round and round, in and out the knife goes. Pull out the mouthpiece!

Wipe away that pumpkin slobber!

For Elmo's clown honk nose, I had the brilliant inspiration to scrape it down to the yellow layer with a grapefruit spoon, though it failed to show up in the dark later. If you say he looks like Grover, I will smash your head like a gourd.



Put his party hat on.

"Elmo likes palm trees!"

"Elmo likes the dark if there's a candle burning inside his head!"

It is true, this charming Elmo is no match for the fine art produced at my friends Andy and Aron's pumpkin carving party last year, where people were using awls and homemade stencils to stab out intricate formations like Sarah Palin's face. But that's why this is a post about butchering vegetables.

Pumpkin hangover

This little pumpkin had too much Halloween fun! I hope y'all had an exciting Halloween weekend. I didn't get to carve a pumpkin this year, but I did witness some really intense pumpkin carving action involving precision tools and stencils of the Cheshire Cat and Sarah Palin's face at my friend Andy's pre-Halloween party. Check out more crazy pumpkins at Epicurious, where I found this amazing barfing pumpkin. You should also check out Andy's freaky wonderful illustrations and comics at andysaurus.com. He spent today selling his comics, t-shirts, and prints at the Alternative Press Expo.

Some people like to carve faces out of pumpkins, others like to sit on them. Henry David Thoreau in his celebration of humble woodland hermitude, Walden, can't seem to make up his mind on this question of pumpkin usage. First he declares, "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." Later on, he decides he's above this crude business of pumpkin sitting, and that all it takes is some clever thrifting to find adequate seating: "None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture!"

Still others like to write songs about pumpkins. For example: Shrimp Boat's "Pumpkin Lover" or Devendra Banhart's "Pumpkin Seeds," not to be confused with The Smashing Pumpkins' entire album called Pumpkin Seeds. I haven't been able to make out how or if pumpkins actually factor into the Shrimp Boat song, but I did manage to catch the part where Mr. Devendra sings: "You ever make a soup out of pumpkin seeds? There's a lot of skin and flesh I should have never seen..."

More on pumpkins to come! Just you wait.