Pumpkin Suprise!!

 
Aren't pumpkins great?
There are so many varieties of them and all of them are delicious.
In this case we used a kambocha squash. When we bought it we left it sitting outside next to other pumpkins in order to mature a little and get sweeter.

There are so many ways to cook pumpkins and since this squash was in such a nice shape, we decided to cut the top open and stuff it with goodies.

Remember the sneak peak last night? Pumpkin surprise

Well, the result is here:

It was sooo good!

How did  I do it you say?

Read on!

Ingredients - can serve up to 5 people with 1 medium squash

• 1 Kambocha squash
• rice of your choice - 2 cups
• quinoa - half a cup
• asparagus chopped up - your choice how many
• 1 onion
• 1 orange's zest
• apple-cranberry sauce -(homemade) - can use apple sauce instead or substitute of your choice
• margarine
• cinammon
• water
• salt to taste

 Clean the flesh from the cut pumkin and set it around your main dish.

Instructions
Start with cutting the pumpkin top open and cleaning the seeds inside. You can save the seeds and dry roast them for a snack later or if you so wish. You can also save them and use them to plant some pumpkins in your yard!
Pre-heat the oven at 400 degrees Farenheit (200 degrees Celcius).
Prepare you cookware, use margarine so it doesnt stick and come apart. I also put margarine on the pumkin slices and the main dish itself so sweeten it up.
Start cooking your rice, leave it on for 10 minutes so that it will be half cooked before adding it to the pumpking.
Add asparagus, quinoa and the rice as a filling in the pumpkin. Add the cinammon in and around the pumpkin as you can see above.
Add the apple-cranberry sauce on top of it all, as well as the onion (i spread it around the pumpkin after i took the photo you can see above) and orange zest.

Pour some water in the dish so that it can be used to cook the rice and pumpkin.

Put it in the oven for 45 minutes until the color is a nice golden one. Done!

Optional:
Put it in the over and after about 20 minutes take it out, mix the stuffing together some more (making sure the apple sauce is thouroughly mixed in), then take the softened up pumkin lying around and make a 'cover' for our squash. It will create a semi-crispy outside that is nice and leave the inside soft and moist. Put it back in for another 25 minutes until cooked.

Bonus!!

 Lactose-free/ Gluten-free rice pudding!!

Ingredients

• rice of your choice (though preferably sticky rice)
• Coconut milk
• cinammon for taste
• rosewater
• some sugar
• rice flour for thickening up

Make it as you would normal rice pudding, adding coconut milk instead of milk when cooking the rice. Add cinammon and instead of egg, add the rice flour to thicken it up and at the end when it's off the heat, add the rosewater (so it doesn't evaporate).

This turned out so good, you can eat it while it's hot, or cool it in the fridge, it's really up to you!!

Hope you enjoy it!