Don’t you just love pumpkin? I do, in all its forms, baked, roasted, cooked, raw even, in soup etcetera, etcetera. And to think that a couple of years ago I did not even know that you could actually eat pumpkin! I thought that they just served decoration purposes.

The fact that I did not know that pumpkin was for consumption as well is rather interesting and strange. I mean, my parents grew up in Amsterdam and were teenagers during the second World War. And of course in that last winter of 1944-45 there was a serious food shortage, especially in the cities. So my mother and her 5 siblings were sent to the Dutch isles (in the north). People over there took city children into their homes and shared their food with the seriously underfed children. On those isles there was lots of farming, so you would think they would have had pumpkin besides potatoes to feed on. And if she did why did she not feed her own 7 children this lovely healthy vegetable?? I will never know because she passed away a long time ago.

But that is all in the past and I did discover pumpkin and my children also. They devour my pumkin soup which I posted recently and I am happy they do.

So I started this new year with our favorite vegetable at this moment, being the pumpkin. I had found myself a new recipe in my new cookbook my husband bought me as a Christmas present “My New Roots” by Sarah Britton. This dish is inspired by one of her recipes, I just made a few alterations because I thought then it would taste even better.

It is fairly simple to make but it looks spectacular (if I say so myself..) and believe me, it tastes like it looks. What a great combination of flavors and structure. This is definitely going to be one of my favorite dishes of 2017!

Of course the roasted pumpkin and the black rice are not new to me and I am pretty sure not to you either. The new thing in this dish is the dressing. In the cookbook it is a tangerine-tahin dressing. I made an orange-tahin dressing instead.

What a great way to start the year!