There are lots of cooks out there who actually know what they are doing. I pretty much taught myself to cook, out of necessity. I haven’t a clue most of the time, but I do love to eat. By an accident of fate, I ended up with a single quail in my ice chest at Halloween Camp. A perfect opportunity to try out a new flavor at camp, but a quail is a small bird, barely enough for one person and I had three to feed. Soup was the obvious way to stretch the meat to fill all our bellies.
I selected a small pumpkin to contain our soup and kept the additional ingredients simple so as not to overpower the flavor of the quail: smokey dried pumpkin, fresh chanterelles, some onion, garlic, butter, a little minced candied ginger and salt and pepper to taste.
Ingredients
- 1 quail (2 or 3 would be better, game hen or a small chicken would also work)
- dried pumpkin – I broke 2 or 3 dried pumpkin rings into fragments a couple inches long
- 1 small onion, chopped
- chanterelles – I washed and chopped up a couple medium sized cahnterelles. More or less will still work.
- garlic clove, minced
- 1 small pumpkin, just large enough to fit the soup into
- 1/2 stick butter
- A couple of small pieces of candied ginger, maybe a tablespoon, minced fine
- tarragon – I didn’t use any, but I bet it would be good
- salt and pepper to taste
Robert dug a pit where we built a fire, burning it for hours to build a deep bed of coals.
I placed the quail in a bush pot filled with water and hung it over the fire to boil until the meat was tender enough to pull off the bones. Reserving the meat, I put the bones back in the broth and hung the pot to boil some more.
When the bones had boiled for awhile I strained them out of the broth, discarding and replacing them with the meat, fragments of dried pumpkin, chopped mushrooms, onions and other ingredients. Allowing the soup to hang in the flames, I turned my attention to the pumpkin, which I hollowed out, discarding the stringy pulp and saving the seeds to roast, seasoned with a little bolete salt. When this was done, I poured the soup into my hollow pumpkin.
We scooped the coals out of the pit and placed the pumpkin into the hole, shoveling coals back in around it. We allowed it to bake for 45 minutes.
When we retrieved the pumpkin the outside was beginning to roast; the inside flesh had not cooked. The soup, however, was steaming hot, so we served it anyway. It was delicious!
Things I would do differently:
I think I would make the pit a little smaller so it was a tighter fit for the pumpkin. I would make a fire next to the pit, as well as one inside it. This would produce more coals which I could shovel around and on top of the pumpkin, getting more coverage than we did this time.
I think it might take about 2 hours to actually roast the pumpkin. I worry it might get too soft, risking a puncture and loss of the soup. Perhaps wrapping it in several layers of foil would be a good precaution, and using heavy leather gloves to aid in removing it from the pit.
Making the opening at the top a little bigger would make cleaning the pumpkin a little easier.
Slathering the pumpkin inside and out with melted butter or lard might be good, too.
