Pumpkins: Better Buy the Can

Every Halloween you hear about cooking with pumpkin. It’s no problem, the well-meaning might say. Just pick up an extra: carve one, cook one. But after a dozen years of experimenting with pumpkin-filled pies, purees, soups, ravioli and just about anything else you can think of, my advice is short. Don’t bother.

The majority of the pumpkins you’ll find in stores this week just won’t cook worth a darn. Their flesh is watery, stringy and thin-tasting. People tell me the seeds are better when roasted on a baking sheet and salted, but I’ve tried that too and don’t see the attraction.

There’s a reason for this. The pumpkins that are raised for cooking and those that go into commercially canned pumpkin and pie mixes are of different varieties (the main one is called, for obvious reasons, “Libby Select”). They are thicker-skinned, paler and have meatier flesh.

On top of that, this year’s pumpkin crop is small and expensive because of the mid-summer heat wave that threw off the growing schedule.

You can get pumpkins that taste good if you can find sugar pumpkins in your produce section or growers market. These are pumpkins that are grown for cooking and though they don’t look as pretty, they taste pretty good.

Or you can do as I do and just use butternut squash, which is thick and creamy and tastes like those show pumpkins wish they did.

* Now is the time of year when local shrimp start showing up in better fish markets and growers markets (see Growers Markets below). Most of the shrimp comes out of the Santa Barbara area and is one of two types--spot or ridge-back. Spot shrimp--favorites in local restaurants--are caught in traps, like lobsters. Huge--going six to nine shrimp to a pound--they are a beautiful coral color raw and frequently come laden with roe, which makes them a favorite for sashimi. Unfortunately, they must be cooked very, very quickly (two minutes or less) or they turn mushy. The ridge-back are caught in nets and thus are cheaper. They are smaller, more like the familiar 26 to 30 to a pound, and more forgiving when cooked.

* How expensive can tomatoes get? That’s the question many in the produce industry are asking these days after prices more than doubled in a two-day span. In some stores, prices are in the $2 a pound range.

What’s happening? Florida points its finger at California; California points right back. In fact, they’re both right. Because of the heavy rains that accompanied Hurricane Andrew, Florida growers are a week to 10 days late in starting their harvest, meaning the crop is anywhere from 20% to 45% less than it should be at this point. At the same time, the majority of the California harvest should be coming from the area around Tracy, near Stockton. But because tomatoes were priced so low last year, farmers in the area planted less this year--approximately 25% less in the Tracy area. Between the two, things are so bad that one tomato packer is sending its restaurant customers signs that say “Tomatoes by Request Only.” Things aren’t likely to change for another couple of weeks.

GROWERS MARKETS

At the Friday-morning market in downtown Long Beach, there are two great Southeast Asian stands. T. S. Farms from Fresno has Japanese, Chinese and Thai eggplants, including makeua poh , a green-striped, golf-ball-sized Thai eggplant, and makeua peuang , a tiny, pea-sized green bunch eggplant for Thai cooking. In addition, it has bitter melon, lemon grass, purple-shooted Thai basil, tiny Thai peppers, chayote shoots and tseetgwa and szegwa squash.

Chris Yang, also from Fresno, has many of the same things but also light-green and dark-green long beans; bitter melon shoots; shing ha choi , which looks like a paler bok choy; gaai laan (white mustard greens) and choi sum (yellow mustard greens).

In other stalls, Pete Siracusa of J & P Seafoods has Santa Barbara spot and ridge-back shrimp, swordfish, yellow-fin tuna, halibut, snapper and sand dabs. Blair Smith from Santa Maria has artichokes, red bell peppers, tomatoes, carrots, green and yellow beans, broccoli and cauliflower.