Baked & stuffed pumpkin

Every Christmas, I like to try to make something new, something a little special and different. Simon find this strange and couldn't believe I do this at stressful times like x'mas. I don't know why but doing a new dish makes the dinner more intresting for me and I often try new things on people. Not all things I did came out great of course. This year my experiment was the stuffed pumpkin (Jamie Olive's Hamilton pumpkin in one of his earlier cookbooks).



I cut the pumpkin in half, scooped out the flesh(this took me about an hour of hard work!!), fried the onions and mushrooms, roasted the pine nuts, ground spices, mixed the rice in and put everything together the day before x'mas. Luckily I did it the day before because it was quite a lot of work. It smelt beautiful after baking for 1and a quarter hours on x'mas day. I left it out to rest for some time. Initally I thought the hard bits were the spices then I realised it was uncooked rice! Most of the rice was well cooked. I don't believe cooking longer would make any difference. In fact, I think the pumpkin was overcooked as the colour was very dull and texture very soft (I didn't weight the pumpkin, my pumpkin possibly was smaller than the recipe's). I think the uncooked rice was due to uneven moisture even though the book says not to worry about rice not being cooked as the mostiure in the pumpkin will keep the rice moist. It was editable and most of the rice was alright. But any amount of hard rice every so often still ruined the dish. It was not a great sucess like I hoped it would be.



I would not try this dish again in a hurry. It was too much work for someone with two little kids like me. But will I try something else new next x'mas? The bet is I probably will!