Pumpkin pies are one of the symbols of Thanksgiving in North America. But the rest of the world probably thinks they're crazy because they're eating these bad tasting pumpkins. In fact it was only after I moved to Japan that I realised just how bad tasting these pumpkins are. Introduction Hi and welcome to the Les Perras podcast for extensive English listening where you can extend your listening vocabulary. Today is episode 309 and it's about pumpkin pies. At the end of this episode I'll have a short list of some of the main vocabulary that you can listen for in this podcast so be sure to go to the end to find the words on the list.
Yummy I think pumpkin pies are really yummy. They taste great. Every fall I felt sad because number one: everything is turning from a nice colourful green to a drab brown. I don't care what other people say about fall colours. It's all brown to me. PLUS it's getting cold PLUS the days are getting shorter PLUS I had to go back to school when I was a young boy. So fall wasn't very good for me, but I could look forward to one thing: the pumpkin pies. I'm a big pumpkin pie fan and I think that they taste delicious. For me in the fall there's no food better than pumpkin pie with a great big dollop of whipped cream on top. Naturally I like the whipped cream. But I wouldn't enjoy eating pure whipped cream just as eating a plain pumpkin pie with no cream on it is less pleasing. When you put the two together it's a delightful dessert. Spices Lots of spice go into these pumpkin pies. Lots of sugar goes into them too but I'll talk about that in a minute. A good pie is going to have cinnamon and then it'll have some nutmeg but not too much, as well as cloves and ginger. I've heard some recipes also use allspice which is kind of a strange spice to me. One of the stranger combinations I've read about included cumin and chilli in the pumpkin pies but I'm not sure that that's very common at all. Either way you slice it, your pumpkin pie slice has a lot of different spices in it so it's a great spicy addition to the table in the fall. Bad tasting The pumpkin pie needed a lot of these spices and they needed a lot of sugar. The reason is that these pumpkins just taste bad. When I came to Japan I discovered pumpkins can be sweet and really really good tasting. That's quite a change from the pumpkins back home. In fact pumpkin pie is the only thing that I know for cooking with pumpkins. I'm sure there are other recipes, but my mom never made them. Pumpkin pie was the only thing you could do with a pumpkin. And since it was already bad tasting you had to add spices and lots of sugar to overcome the bad taste of the pumpkin. Jack-o'-lanterns We never used the jack o'lantern that we had outside for Halloween to make a pumpkin pie. The reason is that we always kept the Jac-o’-lantern for a few days after halloween. It seemed like such a shame to put so much work into carving this thing that you didn't want to throw it away or otherwise get rid of it. You kept it as a nice decoration around the house. It was fun and it symbolised the fun of halloween. Unfortunately after a few days they were no longer fit for human consumption. So we couldn't use them to make pumpkin pies. I Made One In fact I only ever made one pumpkin pie from scratch. I convinced my mom to buy an extra pumpkin so that I could try making the pumpkin pie. I discovered that it was a lot of work, because after boiling the pumpkin you had to push it through a strainer to get it to be smooth enough to make a nice pumpkin pie. The spices were great and the sugar was great but the pumpkin was hard work. And at the end of the day the commercial canned pumpkin pie fillings ended up making a better pie than I did, so I never made pumpkin pie a second time.
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