Who has eaten a real pumpkin? Not the kind that come already pureed in a can, and not the pre-made, pumpkin pie filling. Well, I hadn’t. Pumpkin seeds, I was all over. Butternut squash I can roast with the best of them. And let’s just say, I get a kick out of kabocha. But pumpkin, I had never had the joy of making.
Pumpkins had always been too round, too cumbersome, too heavy to negotiate all on their own. I would have visions of me as Sweeney Todd, wielding my kitchen cleaver to hack a whole pumpkin to smithereens, in the hopes of obtaining one salvageable wedge to roast. I read a lot of British cookbooks, and thumb through the occasional British food magazine, and they are always using pumpkin in its various forms. But do they expect me to hack up [...]

Maybe it is just certain octogenarians I have run into, but most of them do two things: talk about their health, and talk about the weather. And now that I have moved to New York, a place that actually has weather and seasons, I find myself doing the same thing (at least the weather part). I mentioned before that it is HOT, but besides the heat there is the humidity, the sort of humidity that makes you want to run back indoors, to your small, air-conditioned apartment, peel off your sticky clothes, and take a cool shower. I’m from California, I mean: What is humidity anyways?
And so I have joined the ranks of those people, the one’s that talk ad nauseum about the weather, and to me, it is endlessly fascinating. We are mostly unpacked, a household’s worth of goods transplanted from California to New York. Newsprint packing has been [...]