Cozy Asian Pumpkin Recipes and Ideas

If you live in the northern hemisphere, it’s hard to escape
pumpkins and various hard fall/winter squashes these days. They’re displayed by the
front doors of grocery stores and end-caps in the produce section. Farmers are
bringing them to our weekly markets and there are better and bigger selections
at Asian grocers. Halloween-carved pumpkins and related holiday decor are front
and center in store ads and people’s lawns. Food magazines are loaded with photos and recipes for squash-centric dishes for Thanksgiving
celebrations. It's a food that screams autumn in color and evokes the coziness of the cooler weather ahead.

In Vietnamese, a generic term for squash is bi and one with red/orange/yellow flesh (e.g.,
pumpkin, kabocha and butternut) is bi do.
We bought a pumpkin to carve for Halloween a couple of weeks ago but instead of
thinking about cutting into it for decoration, I pondered hard squash and
pumpkin recipes.

No, I’m not saying I cook with pumpkins raised for carving.
They don’t taste good. We mistakenly bought a wedge of Cinderella pumpkin from
a Mexican market last month and it looked gorgeous in the oven but tasted blah
on the plate. At the store, I recognized it in its cut form as a decorative
pumpkin but since it was sold under the auspices of being good for cooking, I
tried it out. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.

For cooking, I like kabocha (can’t lose with this Asian
favorite), butternut (sweet, creamy orange flesh), kuri (has a chestnut-like
texture and flavor), and banana (firm flesh, conveniently sold in sections at
supermarkets). I’ve been meaning to try baby cooking pumpkins as they’d
probably work well in recipes.

To prep fall and winter’s bounty of hard squash, I reach for
a cleaver, vegetable peeler, and grapefruit knife. The cleaver is great for
hacking into a big hard squash; if it’s an extra heavy one, use a rubber mallet
to help get the blade through. The peeler is good for removing the tough skin
of butternut squash. A grapefruit knife’s curved blade is handy for scraping
out seeds and stringy fibers lingering in the center cavity; if you don’t have
a grapefruit knife, use a spoon.

Several ways to cook up these orangey beauties and their
parts:

Fried Squash Blossoms
are enjoyed at the Viet table as much as anywhere else. If you grow any
kind of squash, you’ll have blossoms to pick and eat. Pumpkin and other hard
squashes tend to have larger flowers than summer squash like zucchini. But you
can treat them similarly, or select relatively small ones for this recipe.
Large squash blossoms are great and easy to stuff and steam, an approach that I’ve
seen in older Vietnamese cookbooks. Deep-frying is so darn nice though.

Roasted squash with
soy sauce is combination that I gleaned from a friend in high school. I
went over to her house one day and her mom was eating half a table queen squash
that had been roasted with a drizzle of soy sauce. Her mom said it was easy,
nutritious and satisfying for a woman like her who was going through menopause.
Lots of takeaways in that experience and since I’m not yet in that stage in
life, I’ll keep that tip in my back pocket while I simply enjoy my roasted
squash. Here’s an example
of how to roast the squash and enjoy it with a Japanese vegan soy concentrate
(soy sauce that you doctor up to be extra delicious).

Pumpkin and coconut
milk are a match made in heaven. Instead of regular or sweet potato, I cut
up butternut or banana squash into thumbnail size cubes and drop them into a
simmering pot of coconut-milk laden Thai curry; try it in place of potato in the
Thai
yellow curry with beef. The result is a great flavor and color contrast. If
you have Into the Vietnamese Kitchen,
the winter squash simmered in coconut milk recipe on page 176 is terrific. The
vegan dish combines peanuts with banana squash and sweet potato in a creamy
sauce.

Pumpkin, lime leaf,
and coconut soup (at the top of the post) plays off the idea of combining
pumpkin and coconut milk. The recipe was something I came up with for my
husband’s aunt who was basically on her deathbed and couldn’t eat solid food.
She lived for two more years after I made the soup for one of the last
Thanksgiving dinners with her. The recipe
is easy and you can zip things up with chile oil, if you like.

Roasted kabocha and vegetable
dumplings is a terrific way to use leftover roasted winter squash. It’s
savory-sweet and loaded with color and texture. I made it in response to a few
so-so renditions of pumpkin dumplings I had at Asian restaurants. As shown in the above photo, this vegan recipe
can be cooked in many ways.

So what are your
pumpkin tips and tricks for the season?

Related posts:

• Fried
  squash blossoms
• Thai
  yellow curry with beef
• Japanese
  vegan soy concentrate
• Pumpkin,
  lime leaf and coconut soup
• Roasted
  kabocha and vegetable dumplings