Pumpkin Day arrives & a tart to celebrate
I harvest the winter squash and make a pumpkin & roast onion filo tart. Plus, other ways to welcome the pumpkin harvest.
Not all harvests behave the same.
Some come in dribs and drabs – the odd carrot, erratically germinated, picked whenever they look big enough. Others in fits and starts – after the first bowl of pea pods, for example, I find the plant takes a pause before another flush of flowers appear. And then there’s the relentless givers – courgettes, spinach, runner beans – that just never, ever stop. Pumpkins though, in fact all winter squash, are in a league of their own.
It doesn’t get better than pumpkin day.
Because, once pumpkins are ready, they must all be picked at once: Pumpkin Day. If you are lucky this will involve a wheelbarrow and an afternoon workout lugging armfuls of edible bowling balls from patch to barrow and into the greenhouse or shed to store.
Judging when to declare it Pumpkin Day is a bit of an art.
Winter squash need a long growing season, so the more sunshine you can expose them to the better they will ripen and the sweeter the flesh. The fruits can take a light frost, but the leaves will wilt at the first sign of a chill. From here on, the fruits may ripen in any late sunshine, but they won’t continue to grow much because the leaves providing most of their nutrients have crinkled to brown, papery skeletons. The knack is to give the fruits as much sunshine as you can without subjecting them to too much frost.
Last Sunday was Pumpkin Day
A frost had hit a couple of weeks ago, the forecast was for rain all the following week, and I had a photoshoot coming up (pumpkins make wonderful props), so last Sunday I called it and headed up to the allotment to fill my boot with pumpkins.
And it was a record harvest
I had planted them in June as baby plants poking through black, woven ground cover on my new allotment, left them too it (ok, I fed them maybe twice with liquid seaweed feed, but that was it) and they’ve produced around 20 fruits, any of which would make Cinderella’s mice proud.
Recipes for pumpkins
Before we get to today’s tart recipe, here are some squash recipes from my archive:
Pumpkin and Sage Cake with Thyme and Feta Frosting in my book, From the Veg Patch.
Pumpkin Tikka Masala also from my cookbook.
Squash, Roast Roots and Wild Mushrooms from an ancient blog I wrote.
And more from I recommend from around the Substack kitchen:
Pumpkin & Roast Onion Tart
Charred, sweet pumpkin flesh meets umami roast allium – to me, the very essence of autumn. If you have sage, you could add some here too, but go easy, it can overpower. And if the edges of the filo start to catch when you bake the tart, cover with filo so they don’t burn before the egg filling sets. Delicious warm or at room temperature with a simple salad.
Serves 4-6
4 onions, halved
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for brushing
500g winter squash (about ½ large squash), peeled if needed, deseeded and sliced into 1cm-thick half-moon wedges
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