Just Call Me Martha!

It's very dangerous for me to buy Martha Stewart's magazine. If I start flipping through it, I want to make every single recipe, do all the crafts and I want my house to look exactly like the houses in the pictures. It's inspiring and depressing all at once.

I made the mistake of buying the new fall/Halloween edition. I'm a sucker for both and I was lured in by the cool pumpkin-clock-face on the cover. As expected, I wanted to make everything I saw. A concord grape tart (with the pastry cut out to look like a bunch of grapes!), black light Halloween decorations, marzipan pumpkins, Moroccan lambs shanks...I didn't know where to start!

But then I saw "Stuffed Pumpkin Stew" and I knew I had to make it. Right NOW!! Get this--it's a stew of fall vegetables and chicken and you cook and serve it in a pumpkin! It looked so delicious and fall-like--I couldn't wait to start!

It called for something called a "cheese pumpkin." Sorry, Martha, but I'm not well-versed enough in pumpkins to have a clue what that means. And something tells me if I had set out on a mission to find a cheese pumpkin, I would have come back empty handed. So I got a regular old pumpkin, but kind of a short, wide one so it would hold the stew nicely. Then I had to buy about ten million vegetables. Look at this!

So first you cut the top of the pumpkin off like you would for a jack-o-lantern. Then you take out all the goop and seeds. Then you rub that baby down and bake the pumpkin and the top in the oven for an hour.Then there's all sorts of fancy maneuvers with boiling water and ice water baths. Here are my peas resting in ice water:
Then you have to chop the ten million vegetables and roast them with olive oil.
Meanwhile, you have to prepare the chicken. Oh,and I forgot about sauteing the apples!

When everything is roasted you put it all inside the pumpkin with some chicken stock and bake the whole thing. Check it out:
In Martha Stewart's pic you probably wouldn't see the yucky baking sheet or the pile of text books in the background--but still! Doesn't it look delicious and the perfect thing to serve for a fall dinner??

Here it is on the plate. Martha actually slices the pumpkin and serves it on the plate, but I found that when you scooped out the stew it was easier to just scoop out some pumpkin. And my "generic" pumpkin tasted just fine!

I wish I could find a link to the recipe--but I can't. If anyone is interested, I'll type it out, just let me know--otherwise, it's in the current Martha Stewart Living.

One more thing--a fun blog called The Cutting Edge of Ordinary is having a cool giveaway--a baking book and some other treats. Check it out!