First Apartment: The Great Pumpkin Mistake

'Tis the season to carve pumpkins.  My jack-o-lantern, Carlos, sits on my desk and grins at me, toothy and lopsided, while I type.  More importantly, 'tis the season to eat pumpkin pie (sorry, Carlos).  I hate berry pies--though I recently learned that pumpkins are, in fact, berries (penultimate paragraph), so perhaps I need to adjust that statement--and apple pies are of no consequence to me.  But the pumpkin pie, I think we can agree, is one of the finest after-dinner triumphs known to Americans.  Of course, one need not wait until dinner for victory: breakfast, lunch, and midnight snacks give one an equal sense of satisfaction.

But not all pumpkin pies are created equal, as my roommate so aptly proved last fall when she decided to make a pie from scratch--from an actual pumpkin, that is.  None of this One Pie or Libby's from-a-can nonsense.  No, she was going to go for the gold: Short of picking out her very own Carlos from the patch, she wanted to do everything by hand for a truly homemade dessert experience.

I suppose this comes from a strange post-college desire to see just what, exactly, you can achieve as an adult.  The twenty-something years, I've discovered, are filled with this inexplicable and sudden longing to "do it yourself," to try new things, and to generally figure things out, even if it is through trial and error: What kind of an adult do I have the capacity to be?  Am I handy?  Am I lazy?  Am I creative?  It's about proving yourself.  Am I someone who buys canned pumpkin, or do I have what it takes to turn raw, orange guts into a stunning culinary delight?  (As if the latter somehow gives you a leg up.)

Some things, however, are not worth figuring out, no matter how attractive the challenge may seem.

First of all, making a pumpkin pie from scratch is a lot of work.  Carving oval eyes and the traditional triangle nose into Carlos was about as much as I could handle.  Heck, I struggled to chop and cook a butternut squash for soup last winter; I can't imagine attempting the same with a much larger pumpkin.  Once you get through the seeds and manage to hack the thing up into boil-able pieces (again--sorry, Carlos), you've still got to peel it and mash it and get it into a puree that's reasonably fit for a pie. 

In retrospect, this process probably would've been easier on my roommate if we'd had a food processor.  As I experienced with my butternut fiasco, a blender--a weak one at that--just doesn't cut it.  Literally. 

So the pumpkin pulp retained a bit of its original lumpy, mysteriously stringy texture.  I equate it to the sense you get from natural peanut butter: You know it's probably better for you because you can pronounce all the ingredients, but the texture is so darn weird; sometimes "organic" is a little too close to the ground for comfort.

The spices didn't help the situation, either.  Even now, no one quite knows what it was, but after the pie was baked, there were clumps of something white--a powder, maybe?--that hadn't mixed in all the way.  The other spices stuck to their own kind too, which created pockets of flavor, like merry little surprises in each mouthful.  The overall consistency of the filling was also wetter than usual.  This made for a slightly leaky slice on your plate and a soggy crust in the pan several days out of the oven.  Not only that, but a pool of condensation (presumably from the plastic wrap over the top) collected on the surface of the pie, glossy and admittedly unnerving.  We'd cut a slice and the water would drip down the side, only to soak into the bottom of the remaining pie.

We chucked it at that point with the understanding that your pie should not cry unless the face of the Virgin Mary is baked into it--and you probably shouldn't eat it then, either.

This year, needless to say, my roommate is baking her pie from a can.  Not that she's lost the do-it-yourself spirit, but after giving it her best shot, she learned she's the kind of adult that prefers product over process.  (At least when it comes to something as serious as pumpkin pie.)  As Thanksgiving approaches, I wholeheartedly support that discovery.

And, if his smile is any indication, I'm pretty sure Carlos agrees.