Mads Refslund & Tama Matsuoka Wong

The caramelization makes these an addictive snack as well as a crunchy addition to soups, frostings, and salads.

In October, there are so many pumpkins for sale for carving and decoration. (In fact, every year Americans buy about 1.1 billion pounds of pumpkins, according to the national Agricultural statistics service.) Seeing all this American plenty got me energized to cook them. Whole pumpkins come in so many different shapes, sizes, and colors, so rather than developing a one-size-fits-all recipe, I came up with two different cooking methods, based on size. We are not going to mislead you into thinking there is a secret equation that x pounds of pumpkin equals x cups of puree. larger pumpkins can have less puree if they are hollow. Some small pumpkin varieties have more flesh.

Enjoy this chewy and intensely flavored jerky as a snack or use to finish dishes with beautiful color and pumpkin flavor.

This recipe began as an experiment and turned out great. It uses the bottom of the pumpkin as a natural crust. Then again, maybe it’s not as new as I think:
 I have heard that European settlers made the first pumpkin pie from a whole pumpkin by scooping out the seeds and filling the inside with honey and milk and then baking it in hot ashes.

I started thinking about about the waste from coffee because in a restaurant people drink a lot of coffee; you can end up throwing away a lot of coffee grounds. We decided to start cooking with used coffee grounds, and the dishes we came up with tasted just as good - with a rich dark coffee - as they would have using fresh coffee grounds. Just store the ground in the refrigerator in a sealed plastic container with enough space for air circulation.

I made this at ACME restaurant and it turned out to be so popular that we ended up with too many wilting lettuce leaves left over. So I started using the lettuce to make Wilted Romaine Cream Sauce (below) to go with the bottoms. Recipe serves four; add additional bottoms for more servings.  

I started thinking about about the waste from coffee because in a restaurant people drink a lot of coffee; you can end up throwing away a lot of coffee grounds. We decided to start cooking with used coffee grounds, and the dishes we came up with tasted just as good - with a rich dark coffee - as they would have using fresh coffee grounds. Just store the ground in the refrigerator in a sealed plastic container with enough space for air circulation.