I don’t remember how I wound up subscribing to Gourmet magazine. I think it was a combination of factors: one, my friend Christine, who is a great cook, said that it is her favorite. Two, they tempted me with a $1 per issue subscription, or something ridiculously cheap.
It’s one thing to subscribe to Gourmet, browse it, find some inspiration, and eventually discard it. It's another to make the food in it. Who am I to be put off by “start to finish time: 7 hr”? With tantalizing phrases such as, “A stew-stuffed pumpkin is sheer drama”, and “Why stop at cookies when you can transform your kitchen into a full-scale holiday sweetshop?”, my voice of reason flies out the window and I find myself with enough dirty dishes to warrant hiring a day laborer, baking crostata at 10 pm on a Monday night. This is not normal.
For Thanksgiving this year, we tackled their “Pumpkin Stuffed with Vegetable Stew” and “Roasted-Vegetable and Wine Sauce”. I won’t lie. It took a while to make. But, in an unusual turn of events, the recipe looks more complicated than it actually is. The hardest part was rounding up the ingredients.
Armed with a long shopping list, I went to my trusty organic market to stand in front of the carrots-and-celery section for a good 5 minutes, looking for parsnip. This is one of those stores that doesn’t bother to place its food labels in any relation to the actual food it refers to, which is fine, unless you’ve never bought a parsnip before. Realizing divine intervention was not forthcoming, I finally asked someone where the parsnips are. They pointed me to the case I’d just stared at in vain. I decided it best to re-phrase my question. “Which ones are parsnips, and while you’re at it, can you point out the leeks, too?”
Whenever I am confronted with a new-to-me vegetable in its raw form, I’m amazed that someone, a long time ago, thought to try eating said food item. A basket of parsnips, celery root, leeks, and chanterelle mushrooms later, I wonder if this isn’t some sort of test.
I roasted the vegetables for the sauce the night before and then started the 2.5-hour long reduction while I went out for a run. Nothing like leaving a full stockpot boiling unattended on the stove to make me run faster. Everything came together well in the end, and was delicious. I’d make it again. Roasting the vegetables and using fresh thyme give the stew good depth of flavor and a very seasonal quality. It’s a great vegetarian main course for Thanksgiving, being festive and savory, clearly not just another side dish. The time and energy put into it ensure that it will likely remain a special occasion meal, though this meal could easily inspire a simpler version one cold and lazy weekend this winter.
Speaking of simpler versions, I’ve got a lot of leftover sauce I should freeze. The sauce is the slowest part, and it would be easy to roast up a random assortment of veggies to stuff into a squash or something in a few weeks, once we’ve recovered from this meal. One problem with making meals from magazines: my food never looks quite like theirs. I think I need to check their picture halfway through to get it right.
The recipes (and their photos) are at the links above. I think, by the way, that for the "sheer drama" the Gourmet food writers so eloquently describe their pumpkin having, you might need to find an 8-9 lb pumpkin, rather than 2 4-lb pumpkins.
Smaller is always less dramatic.
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