an unexpectedly ambitious Friday meal

This culinary adventure started with a pumpkin brought to me by my boss because he'd heard me bellyaching, some days back, about how hard it is to find a decent, Western-style pumpkin. The pumpkin below is a Korean pumpkin that I've seen and photographed on my long walks across the peninsula, but the boss said he'd heard that the smaller, lumpier pumpkins are the better-tasting ones. Here's a look at what the Koreans generically call a squash (호박/hobak):

how it was when the boss gave it to me

After a bit of a scrub:

You must wash the virgin before you sacrifice her. I got to use the utility toothbrush I keep by the kitchen sink. This pumpkin had more butt crack to wash than you'd find on a Kardashian.

Too late to save her now: we've taken the top of her head off.

Slicing north, south, east, west.

guts and seeds revealed

a closeup

When I've dealt with squashes before, I've generally baked them for about an hour or so to soften the fruit, making it easier to cut the flesh out. For some stupid reason, I went with a pumpkin-roasting recipe that recommended only 45 minutes' baking time (for small pumpkins?). Despite an intuition that that wouldn't be enough time to soften the flesh of my pumpkin, I set my oven for 45 minutes at 350ºF (177ºC) and slid the hollowed-out pumpkin (which smelled amazing) into the death chamber to bake.

quartered pumpkin, three of four pieces, ready for launch

another angle

all four quarters, lined up like torpedoes

Turned out that my instinct was right, and I should never have followed those instructions. Most types of squash that come with hard skins usually need at least an hour, sometimes even 90 minutes or more, to have a chance to soften up. When 45 minutes had elapsed, I pulled the pumpkin out, and the flesh was still hard and resistant. I had a choice, then: bake the pumpkin a little more, or risk boiling it to achieve the desired softness. (There's a microwave method, too: on high, 7 minutes per pound, stirring every 2 minutes. I've never tried that.) The risk in boiling is the same risk as when you're boiling potatoes for a mash: if you unmindfully let the taters boil too long, they get waterlogged. Waterlogged taters aren't the end of the world if you let them release their steam and drip a bit, but if you were to try to make mashed potatoes immediately after over-boiling, you'd end up with watery taters. Double-plus ungood. Upshot: timing matters, and my standard for most boil-able vegetables is about 15 minutes.

So I boiled the pumpkin after cutting away the skin, treating the pumpkin flesh like potatoes. Fifteen minutes later, the pumpkin still smelled amazing, and the flesh was properly tender. I containerized most of it:

I had a bit over 1.3 kilos of pumpkin flesh; the recipe called for 425 g (15 oz.).

I fridged the majority of the pumpkin, leaving out only what I needed:

looks a lot like yams

The recipe I found online turned out to be awesome in the taste department, resulting in a pie filling that tasted much nicer than the Costco pie's. Even though the uncooked filling had raw eggs in it, I tasted it because the smell was so overpoweringly alluring... and it tasted fuckin' amazing. This recipe is a keeper for sure. With all the filling ingredients lumped together in a bowl, I got out my stick blender and blitzed the fuck out of the mix, doing my best to leave no long, fibrous strands that might be mistaken for hair. Here's the resultant pie filling:

browner than you'd think, probably because of all the brown sugar (froth due to stick blender)

I had two other types of pie to make: one was a quiche (technically a tart) that included my leftover stuffing; the other was a turkey pot pie using the leftover turkey breast from our Thanksgiving luncheon. For the quiche, I went back to HomePlus in search of Gruyère. There wasn't any, so I ended up with two different Swiss cheeses: raclette (which I love) and Appenzeller which, despite my having lived in Switzerland, I'd never tried before (or I'd tried it but didn't remember it). Both of these cheeses had a pleasant funk to them when I opened them up, and while neither will replace Gruyère as my favorite cheese, they're both worth coming back to—particularly the Appenzeller. The raclette was sold in slices; ideally, it's supposed to be sold as a huge block, wheel, or half-wheel. To eat raclette, you expose the block to an overhead heat source (a bit like a broiler), and when the top layer of cheese has browned and melted, you scrape that layer off (the French verb racler means "to scrape," hence raclette) and eat the cheese with new potatoes, cornichons (tiny dill pickles), cured meats, or other sides (learn more here).

The Appenzeller got grated down; since the raclette came in slices, I simply ran a knife through the slices to produce tiny little cubes, almost as if I were doing a brunoise on vegetables. I covered the bowl below with a culinary shower cap and stashed it in the fridge while I worked on other elements of the two remaining pies.

raclette and Appenzeller, broken down

shrooms and celery for pot pie, also broken down

the quiche elements: savory custard (cream, eggs, herbs, seasonings), leftover stuffing, cheese

A disturbing thought came to me as I was prepping the quiche: what if it didn't work? After all, the stuffing might have a lot of quiche-y components (sausage, veggies, herbs), but it also had raisins in it, and what if those clashed with the Swiss cheeses?

cheese bis (bis is one French way to say "again," "repeat," "twice," etc.)

stuffing, up close and personal

a good look at the custard (seven eggs, heavy cream, herbs, seasonings)

quiche filling, assembled

I turned my attention to the pot-pie filling. There ended up being a lot.

diced potatoes (this is not cheese)

The above taters had to be boiled a bit. 

many, but not all, of the pot-pie elements

frying up the celery to soften it a bit

adding shrooms, which need less time to soften

the happy jumble grows (see the leftover creamed corn on the right?)

I'm bizarrely proud of the Béchamel you see below. To make it creamier (Béchamel famously uses regular milk to achieve creaminess), I added heavy cream near the end of the process. It's a savory cream sauce: I tossed in salt, pepper, and a bit of garlic powder.

Béchamel, Béchameling

the cream sauce gets poured into the bowl in preparation for mixing

The pour continues. Pot-pie bukkake.

how things look after a slight toss

voilà

But I'd forgotten one crucial element after having made so much noise about needing this:

I finally remembered to add in the peas!

I filled two pie crusts with pot-pie filling and initially baked them together after folding the pie-crust dough into ugly, vaguely galette-like shapes and painting everything over with an egg wash. The folding of the dough led to a natural hole in the center, which kept the pot pie from exploding in the oven. Here's one pot pie, out of the oven:

ugly but smelling amazing

After baking the pot pies, I baked the pumpkin pie. The filling for this pie, despite tasting heavenly, was a bit too liquidy for my taste, and the pie came out darker than I would've liked, but that was its natural color, not a sign that anything had burned. I still stand by this recipe, but next time, I might add one more egg and a bit more cornstarch (or potato starch, as the case may be; I don't find that there's any difference in performance between the two starches).

suntanned (but not burned, I swear)

I baked the quiche next:

So what you should know is that all of this pie-making and pie-baking took me through the night. Before midnight, I knew I had to choose between (1) sleeping now and finishing the pies in the morning and (2) powering through the pies now and catching what sleep I could once I was finished. I chose the latter course, so right now, I'm dead tired. I ended up getting only two hours' sleep; I got to work a bit late, but the boss didn't arrive until maybe an hour later. 

Unfortunately, on my way to work, and as I was getting out of the cab, I ended up accidentally damaging my pumpkin pie. As you see in the photo below, I had riskily placed one pie higher and one pie lower. (The differently sized plastic boxes contained the pot pies.) During the cab ride, I was worried that the top pie might slide around and end up crashing into the bottom pie. Everything was fine until I tried to get out of the car: that's the moment the top pie (the quiche) decided to slide toward the bottom pie (the pumpkin). I tried to put my free hand out to stop the quiche's slide, and I somehow managed to rake my fingertips across the surface of the pumpkin pie. Fuck. You see the damage below:

goddammit

Here's a closer look:

Now, I'm just self-flagellating while the undamaged quiche laughs in Swiss French.

Aside from that minor-but-disturbing damage, the pies arrived fine.

Galette? Crunch wrap? Lab-created monstrosity?

The quiche also looks quite suntanned, but we've been through this before with previous quiches: the food is actually fine—not burned at all. But how would the quiche taste?

quiche and pumpkin pie, hanging out on top of the office fridge

We all ended up eating about half of all three pies:

The quiche, as it turned out, tasted fine, or so my Korean coworker said. The boss said the quiche had a "unique" taste that was "hard to describe," but he pronounced it good. Everyone agreed the raisins balanced out the cheese.

The second pot pie was untouched. I had once again made more than enough food.

This leftover pie got eaten tonight when I got back to my place.

pie samples at lunch, pre-microwaving

quiche (L) and pot pie (R), post-microwaving

I took my slice from the damaged section of the pumpkin pie.

Despite being super-moist, the pumpkin pie held its shape when I cut it, but the overall texture was still a bit softer and looser than what I'm used to.

pie by the slice

I didn't have the deep-dish pie tin recommended by the recipe, so the pie was thinner than I'd wanted it to be. I still love the taste, though, made better with my homemade whipped cream:

By the end of lunch, half of the pumpkin pie and half of the quiche had been eaten:

The boss saw how tired I was and let me knock off early. I hung around a bit, did a little work, then left before 5 p.m. Little did the boss know that I'd go home and immediately start working on this long-ass photo essay and blog post. But I think we're done now, so can I stop writing and take a nap?

I hadn't expected to spend so much time and effort in what was supposed to be an attempt to use up Thanksgiving leftovers. Instead, I've managed to prepare too much food yet again, meaning I've got to eat my way through even more leftovers this coming week. Still, I enjoyed making all of these pies. I longer fret about how ugly the pot pies look ever since I had an epiphany: no one really cares about the crispiness or softness of the pot pie's shell—the shell functions almost like dumplings in a soup-and-dumplings meal. Pot pies aren't meant to be neatly carved into wedges: the filling, when it comes out of the oven, is creamy and soupy and a bit runny (depending on your style of pie), so you take a serving spoon, chop away the amount of crust you want, and slop as much filling as you want onto your plate. There's no standing on ceremony with pot pies. I think this also explains why many YouTube and TV chefs can't be bothered to make pot pies with bottom crusts (which I always do): what's the point if the crust is basically just a dumpling analogue? People just want something bready and lumpy to go along with the creamy, savory pie filling. This is also why there's no reason to obsess over whether to microwave a cold pot pie: if the crust gets soft in the microwave, it doesn't matter because dumplings is dumplings.

Luckily for me, though, I have an oven (thanks as always, Charles), so I can give my pies a proper reheat. Which I'll do later this weekend. But first—sleep.

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TRIVIA: if you click on one of the above images, then right-click on the resultant image, look at the image's URL. At the very end of the URL, you'll see the photo's date/time stamp. It looks something like this: 20231111_044154.jpg. The first group of numbers in this example means "2023, November 11." After the underscore, the second group of numbers is the time—hour:minute:second. In this example, that's 04:41:54—4:41 a.m. and 54 seconds. So you can now look through the photos in the above photo essay, see the date/time at which I took each picture, and know how long I'd been slaving away as I made these pies.