Dinner in a Pumpkin

We make this recipe every fall around Halloween time. It's delicious, smells great, and is really filling for little tummies who are about to go out and trick-or-treat! It kind of reminds me of stuffed green peppers, only less tomato-y and, well, in a pumpkin rather than a pepper. When you serve this and scrape the inside of the pumpkin, you get an instant vegetable that is so very tasty! Every time we make it, I always marvel at how it looks like something you'd see on the cover of a fancy cooking magazine. --Stacy

Ingredients:

1 medium pumpkin, seeded
1 onion, chopped
2 T oil
2 lb ground beef or turkey
2 T soy sauce
2 T brown sugar
1 can (4 oz) sliced mushrooms, drained
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 ½ cups cooked rice

Instructions:

Sauté onion in oil. Add ground beef. Cook until brown, stirring frequently. Drain. Mix in soy sauce, brown sugar, mushrooms, and soup. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in rice.

Spoon mixture into pumpkin shell then replace the top. Bake at 350 ˚F for 1 hour or until pumpkin is tender. Use the pumpkin as a centerpiece. Serve from pumpkin, scraping cooked pumpkin for use as your vegetable.

Notes:

You can decorate the pumpkin as a jack-o-lantern using permanent marker, but we prefer to just keep it natural looking as it comes out browned and beautiful. You need a moderate-sized pumpkin for this recipe. We substitute ground turkey for ground beef in most of our recipes and it turns out great in this recipe. We also will mix tofu in with the ground meat to stretch it and get our soy as well. Be careful not to over cook the pumpkin or it will collapse and you’ll have quite the mess.