18 October 2025 Saturday

Is it astonishing that, even when we know our own pitfalls and shortcomings, it is impossible to avoid them, at least occasionally? How many times have I told me, how many times have I written basic rules when preparing food that must be adhered to with religious fervor? A lot. And is it not a thorough schooling when you pull a variation of your own character flaws, half baked, out of the oven. A meal that looked much better than it tasted.

The menu-Pumpkin soup, in the pumpkin

-Stuffed cabbage rolls

-Pears poached in red wine

Sounds wonderfully autumnal, doesn’t it? All things I’ve made before. I was not lacking in attention or care. I allowed enough time, and was enthusiastic about the project. Everything was in good order, except for some reason (or maybe none) I had some anxiety which made its way into the food in a number of surprising ways (or maybe none).

The first thing I did, which I knew not to do, I altered the recipes and some of these alterations resulted in cutting corners. Now look, read, and learn, my friends and see how one decision sets off a cascade of regrets.

For the cabbage rolls, I decided that I would make a version with ground beef and a meatless one. It was ok, because everything else in the preparation is vegan. It starts with a tomato sauce, cooked rice, and of course, the cabbage leaves. So, I’m boppin a long, boiling the leaves, poaching the pears, and I go to make the tomato sauce. I open the fridge and notice a package of bacon I had opened earlier in the week with a few strips left in. I grab it, open it, chop the strips us, and toss them in the pan. I later added the tomatoes and seasoning. A first derivation that meant the sauce was no longer vegetarian. Why did I do this? What possessed me to grab that bacon in the first place? Silly, because now, I had to make another tomato sauce entirely for the vegetarian version. No biggie, but my anxiety spiked when I subsequently approached the pumpkin.

Now this pumpkin was enormous, deep orange, and perfectly globular. A perfect specimen for jack-o-lantering. Painful reminder: the perfect looking pumpkin for jack-o-lantering means it was not bred for its flesh, which was very pulpy and and flavorless, and there wasn’t much of it. So, that. Now, I’ve made this soup before, with stock, cream, and sage. Because I felt weirdly guilty about having put bacon in the cabbage roll tomato sauce, I decided I couldn’t put stock in the soup. Also, I was out of cream, but had a little milk. And I was out of sage, so I substituted it with nothing. Why didn’t I just run to the store and get some? I have no excuse to offer. So, I put in the flavorings, put in the milk which didn’t make it one third of the way up the wall of the pumpkin. So I added. I added……water. Yes, I know. A terrible, terrible idea.

After an hour’s baking. this. Because there was little pumpkin flesh and it was only watered down milk on the inside, this soup was so thin, it broke my heart. It also had the flavor of water. Everything about it was truly disappointing to me. I ate only a couple of bites, and let it go.

Behind the soup in the picture above, you can see the cabbage rolls, which turned out much better, though I only ate one bite because I was tortured by the soup. This is an old family favorite, and I just ate some leftovers for lunch, and they taste better today than yesterday. So, there is some happiness there. I won’t do the bacon again because with the seasoning (which included allspice) made it taste a little bit like Worcestershire sauce.

The pears were fine. I poached them in red wine, cinnamon, and sugar. They turned a beautiful red color like this-

but I don’t remember them tasting too much like pears. I reduced the poaching liquid and poured it over them like a glaze, except then it slid off the pears and candied on the bottom of the dish. So, that.

The pear recipe comes from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food which is a classic cookbook if ever there was one. But I remember a piece of advice that was given in a review of the book many years ago. I paraphrase. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean that it is easy. The ingredients are simple, maybe the techniques are simple, and the flavors may be fresh and honest and whatever, but with food of this nature the devil is very much in the details. If the onion isn’t evenly diced, or the proportions are not correct, it can throw the whole dish off. The pears were successful in this case, but the same rule applies to the pumpkin soup.

Maybe these were good lessons to learn again again, before the holidays descend on us. I promise I will not cut corners. I promise I will not add ingredients just because they are in the fridge. I will not be consumed by fleeting feelings of panic when all I need to do is breathe deeply, keep moving, and for the sake of all things holy, stick to the plan. Yes, we’re gonna stick to the plan.