Halloween Day

This is almost a week old news now. But Ping just feel guilty whenever Ping try to blog or even think about stuff not related to research. With that said, Ping actually celebrated Halloween Day this year! It would have been a lot better if Ping didn't have her prelim coming up in a week but it was still a great Halloween Day. In fact, it's the 2nd time Ping actually do something fun on Halloween. The first time was at Western. It was held at Ellsworth Hall. Ping tried to look for pictures, which Ping thought we did take some but Ping couldn't find any. Maybe it was taken with someone elses camera.

This year, Ping was invited to celebrate Halloween with Steph, Jen and Kristi at Steph's place. It was definitely a unique Halloween because Ping get to carve pumpkins!! Last year, Nok, Ben and Ping went shopping for pumpkin at a pumpkin patch somewhere in Williamston on our way back from temple. But this year, Jen brought us to a shop not too far from Trappers to get the pumpkin. They have a pumpkin patch too but the pumpkins were already picked from the patch. We just have to choose the pumpkins we want - it has to be hard, especially at the bottom of the pumpkin. We drove back to Trappers with the pumpkin in the trunk, which was scary because you can hear the pumpkin bump around. But we arrived back at Steph's place with intact pumpkins!
Before anything is to be done with the pumpkin, we have to rinse it off to get rid of all the dirt. It is definitely the largest fruit (it's fruit right?) Ping had ever seen..definitely bigger than durian. Eh..wait..maybe nangka or chempedak is even larger? Hmm...can't exactly picture how big is chempedak now since Ping rarely gets to see the fruit. Just eat the chempedak goreng.

Once it is clean on the outside, the guts have to be removed. Initially, Ping thought we would be doing all this on the kitchen floor because it would be very messy but the way we did it, it wasn't too bad at all. Ping also thought that we would be saving the guts for pumpkin pie or whatever people do with pumpkin but apparently this type of pumpkin is not used for cooking. Are there any Hokkien recipes with pumpkin? Don't know any at all..and there's no pumpkin in M'sia either right? In the first place, is there a hokkien word for pumpkin? *bleh* The one pumpkin dish that Ping loves is "nangua chao yadan/xiandan" (pumpkin with salted egg). Dad introduced it to Ping when Ping went to Beijing. Ever since that first dish, everytime we get local Beijing food, that's one of the dish Ping would order. Here's a pic from Xi Hai Yu Sheng restaurant at Hou Hai, Beijing. Am sure you know which one is the pumpkin dish.
As you can see below, the pumpkin is not like most 'gua', it doesn't have a lot of flesh. So we just dig in with our fingers and pluck out all the guts. Using the spoon, we scrape until all the juicy and soft stuff are removed.
Once the guts are removed, we cleaned it up again so that it is not sticky on the outside. Then it's time to carve!! That's the fun part! Try guessing which one is Ping's... :P
While Kristi and Ping was removing the pumpkin guts, Steph and Jen made us pizza and garlic bread! The pizza was great! They didn't add the loads of cheese that you usually get from most pizza shops here. While the States are really big on pizza, they don't have those really good Pizza Hut pizza that we have in M'sia. We used to get the Hawaiian Chicken whenever mum is busy or boy wants to eat pizza. Here, the pizza are sold by number of toppings and there's ALWAYS loads of cheese! But Ping has learned a lot of good topping combination from Steph and Big K these past couple years. The toppings that Jen made for us was tomatoes and mozarella cheese.
Steph also bought us the Witches Brew wine (right next to the garlic bread). It is a spiced wine made right here in Michigan and is suggested to be served warm. Totally clueless about wine, Ping thought that wine are usually served chilled. There's definitely lots of spice in the wine and Ping is not used to it at all. Thankfully, Jen and Kristi also didn't seem to like the wine. Otherwise, Ping had to drink it all down.