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| Savor the rich, layered flavors of my Harvest Pumpkin Stew, a vegan twist on traditional beef stew, served in a tender pumpkin shell! |
Argentina is not a country that pops to mind when one thinks of Vegan or even Vegetarian fare. Argentina is renowned for its beef-eating, the average consumption of which is something like 150 pounds annually... My beef-raising brother and his wife went to Argentina just to see their famous wandering herds and horses. They had a wonderful holiday.
It turns out that they DO actually have some marvellous vegetarian restaurants, probably because they have a large cosmopolitan tourist industry and have hopped on the bandwagon with the rest of the Global community (yay!). I'm featuring a really yummy Vegetable stew, an adaptation of a beef stew. If you are a lover of beef, I would be surprised if you were not delighted to find that you don't actually miss the meat in this particular multi-flavoured vegan stew. Enjoy!
Ingredients:
1 large Onion, chopped
1 large Porcini Mushroom Cap, cut up
2 Garlic cloves, minced
3 T. Olive Oil
1 large Green bell pepper, chopped
2 large Tomatoes, chopped
Celtic Sea Salt, to taste (1 scant teaspoon?)
Cayenne
1 cup Dried Apricots
3 White potatoes, peeled and diced
3 Sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
2-3 cups Vegetable broth
Water to prevent burning as required
1/4 cup Worcestorshire Sauce
1/4 cup Apple Cider Vinegar or Basalmic Vinegar (optional)
1 16-oz can Whole kernel corn, drained
2 cans organic Black Beans (drained- may use a mix of beans)
1 Medium sized pumpkin
METHOD:
Saute onion, garlic, and mushroom in Virgin Coconut Oil . Add tomatoes, green pepper, salt, Worcestershire Sauce, Apricots, white potatoes, sweet potatoes and broth.
Cover and simmer 1 hour. (Add water or broth as needed to prevent burning)
Meanwhile, cut top off pumpkin and discard. Scoop out seeds and stringy membrane.
Brush inside of pumpkin with melted Virgin Coconut Oil and sprinkle lightly with salt and cayenne. Stir ACV or basalmic vinegar, corn and beans into stew and spoon into pumpkin shell.
Place shell in shallow pan and bake at 325F 1 hour, or until pumpkin meat is tender. Place pumpkin in large bowl and ladle out stew, scooping out some of pumpkin with each stew serving.
AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE STEW IN THE SHELL:
An alternative to the cooking and serving the stew in the shell would be to simply roast the shell as above and remove the pulp, dice it, and add it to the other stew ingredients. This method allows for the use of a pumpkin shell flesh that has perhaps briefly used as a jack-o-lantern to be re-used as a meal. I would suggest, for safety's sake, that the jack-o-lantern be less than 2 days old and that flesh be washed before roasting.
And yet another alternative, and one that we are trying this Fall, is to scoop out the seeds and roast 3 smaller (ïndividual eating size) squashes and serve the stew in each of them. I used a fourth squash-- a butternut-- diced up in the stew instead of chipping away at the fairly sparse flesh of these small gourds. It is a little "labor intense"I should tell you-- I roasted all the vegetables and then added them with the beans, mushrooms, etc. to the stew, and the pumpkin and squash were also roasted. This is quite a bit of fun, and extremely yummy! See what we did in the collage below with 2 squash and a sugar pumpkin:
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