What I Cooked Last Night

Cut six slices of prosciutto into small squares the size of a Christmas stamp, and fry them in a large non-stick lidded pan for half a minute in some oil. Chop a kilogram of pumpkin into one-inch cubes, and two onions finely. Add these to the pan. Sauté on the lowest heat, lifting the lid to stir every now and then with a wooden spoon, until the pumpkin starts to soften. Chop a bunch of spinach and add to the pan along with a drained can of corn. Stir again, then place the lid back on the pan. Continue to cook very gently. Add salt and pepper. Serve as a main with torn basil and Greek-style yogurt, or as a warm salad with tahini, toasted pine nuts and a squeeze of lemon. Eat before midnight when it will turn back into plain boiled pumpkin.

Peel it and chop it up. This is easier said than done. Pumpkin's dense texture means a good knife and a steady hand are essential. One slip and you'll lose a finger. The following recipe means the peril is worth risking. Pumpkin with spinach, corn and fresh basil. I am fond of the vegetable known in some parts of the world as being food fit only for pigs. ( Only ? The pig is one of the noblest creatures, if your moral universe extends to an animal pecking order. Orwell was right, but he got the order wrong. Squealer should have been a snake.) I like pumpkin’s sweet, mellow flavour when it is baked or sautéed, especially when eaten with contrasting flavours or textures. I’m not so fond of it when mashed together with potato, a common childhood side ('golden potato') and one which, it seemed to me, masked the assets of both vegetables. Having arduously made small cubes of a one-kilogram pumpkin, don't put away the knife. First, chop two onions and then cut six ...

It’s that time of year. Drumroll: basil arrives in the garden. After last year’s basil had gone to seed, I had placed the stalks in a paper bag in the shed and, six months later, scattered the dried seeds about the garden. It’s hit and miss. You never know where seedlings will come up. But when they do they are bulletproof. Neither heat wave nor snail can stop a rampaging basil plant. * It’s a retail relic; an artefact of days gone by. It should be listed in Carter’s guide to 1950s collectables. What is it? It’s the deli section at Piedimonte’s. It cannot last, of course. Piedimonte’s deli hangs on grimly to its customer base of elderly Italian and Greek immigrants who still refuse to shop where their children now do; at the thousands of Coles and Woolworths hypermarkets spreading across the country like an army of freeze-dried mediocrity. Piedimonte’s cannot compete with Coles and Woolworth’s, but its deli makes the Coles and Woolworths equivalents look like pig troughs of bulk pa...