Squmpkin

Inspirational song: Squonk (Genesis)

What exactly is a squmpkin? Good question. Yes, it's a word we more or less invented for our purposes, but we still are not sure how accurately it describes the vegetable in question. Over the years, our garden has been performing its own hybridization experiments, independently, regardless of how many times I have insisted it be stopped. It seems to me that squash plants are capable of mixing and matching pollen at will. They reseed themselves, so they can volunteer year over year, blending and folding themselves into new weird shapes, colors, and tastes. 

This year, what we had the most of resembled slightly oblong pie pumpkins. One would think this was a good thing. One might be wrong. There were bunches of them, in various stages of ripeness, harvested and stored in the garage when the first freeze hit. At Thanksgiving, the Mr took a bagful of them to offer up to his family, and a few were game enough to take them. 

We were supposed to do a potluck tonight (which was canceled mid-day), and we decided to make a squmpkin soup to take to it. Before Mr S-P and daughter number one went up to the cabin, they started them roasting. I am so glad they took on that task. Even tough man hands had a terrible time getting the mystery squash to cut. He had to cut them along their equators, rather than pole to pole, and even then it was a challenge. There is no way I could have managed it. My daughter seasoned them, and they roasted gently for upwards of two hours. I let them cool completely, and then scooped out the flesh to boil into soup. Amazingly, cooking made the shells even harder. They were like dried gourds. (The Mr later said, "It's a good thing we can put them in industrial compost." Our home compost would never break these down.)

I still don't know what this stuff was. The flesh was fairly yellow, sort of dry, and only vaguely stringy. It had aspects of acorn and spaghetti squash and pie pumpkin all at once. But with the right spices, boiled in a little chicken bouillon, with cream, butter, and black rice added at the end, it made a hell of a soup. I guess I don't need to know exactly what it was, as long as it does not grow next year.