If I ever own a farm house, I shall grow Pumpkin

This fascination of planting pumpkin seeds started with the wonders of the pumpkin seed delicacies I had over the years. Sunkissed pumpkin seeds are rich in nutrients and are known to be gut-friendly. As a substitute for cashew paste gravy, pumpkin seeds’ paste feels lighter and keeps that everything-sweet gravy story tangier and close to Eastern Indian origin, for me. Surprisingly enough, the taste travelled all the way to the Sri-lankan curries I had a chance to savour.

Coming to what would happen if I planted the seeds as a farmer. My green creepers shall grow creepier bearing yellow flowers and round yellow giants with plenty of seeds inside each! I’ll come to the flowers later. What I can do now is to pluck the fruit and scrape off the seeds first, only to see more pulp to handle. This pulp could then go to two places, namely the melting pot and the frying pan; scraped pulp for soups or sweet dishes like the pudding or the halwa and diced in different sizes for the difference in curries I have been talking about, with or without the paste, to be had with a thin crust pumpkin pie.

The flowers! Yes, pumpkin fritters with rice-flour paste with salt and red chilli powder/flakes/green minced chilies to taste- again a delicacy typically to suit the taste buds of Eastern India. You could Google search  ‘Pakhaala’ to see how pumpkin flowers go with it.

Moving to what remains- the leaves. Minced leaves cooked with a sprinkle of mustard seeds sputtering with a red chilly and a teaspoon of salt. Done. Interestingly, the creepers would spread out on the roof of the Grand Hut made of dried blades of wild grass so I don’t accidentally mistake the creepers to be serpents crawling freely on a free-for-all land.

The story doesn’t end here. Since I can’t wait to eat the whole produce, I need a few large  pumpkins left to dry so I could hand those over, with care, to the person who would craft out musical instruments from those dried hollows, to play for my plants to listen to while they grow, as a gesture of my gratitude to the pumpkin seeds of my farm house. Do visit me and my creepers on my pumpkin-farm house!