Trick or treat

A couple of weeks ago, my host mom asked me if I'd ever eaten such a thing as the long, orange gourd sitting on the kitchen counter. I looked at it and said, no, not unless I've eaten it here without knowing it. She said, no, she'd never made it for me but that she thought it tasted a little like a vegetable we have in the United States.

"Poo...poo....pooomkin?"

Pumpkin!

Pumpkin is my favorite food. I love carving them at my birthday parties, and I love pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread and pumpkin soup and pumpkin rolls and roasted pumpkin seeds, and pumpkin ice cream, even pureed pumpkin right out of the can.

Finally, one day last week, my host mom cut into the squash called ayote and brought a piece of it to my bedroom to see if I agreed that the inside looks like pumpkin. It's bright orange with flat, white seeds mixed into stringy-looking stuff. Just like pumpkin. My mouth was watering.

She threw chunks of it - skin, seeds and all - into a pot of think, brown, sticky, boiling sugar-cane juice (grown and processed just down the road from my house). After it all simmered together for a while, she put some on a plate for me to try. I could hardly wait for the pumpkiny goodness to hit my tongue.

It was pretty gross. I couldn't even taste the ayote for all the sugar cane. I felt like I needed to pretend to like it, though, after all the fuss I made with taking pictures and all.

There's still three-quarters of the ayote sitting on the kitchen table, which will either sit there until the fruit flies carry it off, or, even worse, until she cooks more. I would ask her if I can cook something with it, something more pumpkin-like, but as you know, my attempts at cooking in Costa Rica haven't gone well so far.