A Fairytale About Healthy Life

April 11, 2022
Owl Feather Farm, San Juan Island

A 22-pound pumpkin is a mighty treasure. We’d grown this one—a variety called “Fairytale”—last summer in our garden; picked it September 30; and stored it in our dining room and garage until April 8. Its beautiful fluted mass slowly turned a chocolate amber color, and in all that time the pumpkin remained perfectly sound, holding fast its thick vermilion flesh inside until… We finally called on it for sustenance last week.
Pumpkin on table, a real fairytale

A real fairytale

Roasted in the oven, pureed and simmered with a bit of cream and maple syrup in our biggest enamel tureen, our pumpkin fed 10 people, twice. So it’s a horticultural marvel—sensational savory ingredients packed in a nature-made storage device that lasts long into winter and spring and is beautifully decorative while it’s powerfully preservative. Can’t say that for Zip-lock bags.
Pumpkin is also powerfully nutritious, high in Vitamin A, immune boosters, lutein and other goodies. But, like so much of what’s good for a healthy life, using it requires intention and dedication.
Cut up pumkin

On it's way to the oven

It took three hours to roast the 2-pound one-sixth slices, another hour to process the flesh, two more hours to cook the soup. No tricks or shortcuts apply to pumpkin soup, unless you buy canned pumpkin at the grocery store, a despicable substance stripped of goodness by America’s industrial agriculture empire.

Not many people start with whole pumpkin when cooking; fewer still grow the entire pumpkins and store them. It’s simple enough, but like so much of modern life, simplicity is not the same as ease, and convenience wins a million times to one.

Our Fairytale was not a fairytale, but if you describe healthful living and the intention and commitment it requires to most people, they retreat from what they believe to be mythical. But some fairytales—maybe most—are choices, not myths.

-Eric Lucas 

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