Iron Chef Jordan

Each month our dinner club gets together for a themed potluck. In October, the theme was Iron Chef. I have only watched Iron Chef a couple of times and not recently but as our hosts explained to us - the idea of the show is that at the last minute the competitors are given the secret ingredient which they must incorporate into their recipes. Our secret ingredient was pumpkin (and we had been assigned a side dish). Pumpkin - great! Except the Embassy store which is usually the source of weird American-only ingredients (taco seasoning, instant pudding, marshmallow fluff) was out of pumpkin (no doubt someone dashed in and bought a dozen cans in preparation for Thanksgiving).

Dan and I visited multiple Jordanian grocery stores and found no canned pumpkin. Stores were selling enormous pumpkins but those aren't the kind of pumpkin that you cook with. In one store, we found a can of pumpkin pie spice - which was helpful because it gave us the word for pumpkin but it wasn't something we needed it is just a mixture of spices we already own. We then decided that pumpkin doesn't really have a flavor and that the dominant flavor in pumpkin bread or pie is really cinnamon. So we created "pumpkin cornbread" and seasoned it heavily with cinnamon and nutmeg and dyed it orange. To add authenticity we decorated it with pumpkin seeds which were were able to find.

At dinner, we tried to keep our lack of a secret ingredient a secret but failed (not because it didn't taste pumpkiny) but because our fellow cooks wondered why we were acting weird in talking about our dish (we are apparently terrible liars). Our fellow cooks apparently all bought enormous pumpkins and made dishes with actual pumpkin - here delicious pumpkin bean dip and yummy pumpkin soup (and a beautiful Syrian table).

Our same group will be celebrating Thanksgiving together. I do not think there will be any pumpkin pie.