Carving Out A Tradition

With pumpkins and a pot of beans, Halloween is a party for all ages

ALTHOUGH MY husband is now in his 40s, he remains a child at heart. His favorite foods are still cookies, pie and cake. He wants a puppy for his birthday. And he's counting down the days till Halloween.

Growing up, my mother threw a Halloween party for all the neighborhood kids. It was a simple affair. We cleared the cars out of the garage and piled TV trays with platters of powdered doughnuts and jugs of freshly pressed cider. Instead of bobbing for apples (too wet and cold), we tied strings to the stems of a dozen or so apples and hung them at various lengths so all the kids had a chance to capture a dangling Macintosh between their teeth. Everyone came in costume.

But a costume party isn't what Van is after, though he did once attend a Halloween party dressed as a "Freudian slip." Van was in his late 20s when he got an overwhelming desire to carve a jack-o'-lantern again. He wanted an opportunity, as an adult, to relive that silly, squishy thrill of Halloween.

It seems his friends did, too. Van's First Annual Pumpkin Carving Party was a huge success, and 15 years later, though it has gone through some iterations, it's still going strong. Carving and creativity remain the central theme. Handmade invitations are sent out. Then there's the pilgrimage to Ikea for a giant bag of tea lights. A few days before the party, the picnic table, generally sopping wet from the fall rains, is brought into the house to dry out. On the morning of the big event, newspaper is strewn over its every square inch and every imaginable carving tool from more than a decade of collecting is unearthed.

Guests arrive with enormous pumpkins. Many have taken to the fields themselves to hand-pick their specimens directly from the source. We chat over guacamole and chips, hot cider and cold beer. Then the serious fun begins. Thousands of seeds are piled into bowls to be cleaned and roasted, and soon elaborately designed pumpkins take form. A black cat silhouette. A translucent ghost. An intricately stenciled, Martha Stewart creation. An enormous spider. A grinning, gap-toothed jack-o'-lantern.

Over the years, as Van and his footloose friends grew older, they brought their spouses and then their children to the Pumpkin Carving Party. Van worried that the party would lose its edge with the addition of kids (his own included). He need not have worried. Inevitably, toward the end of the evening, the children have deserted the carving table for the video console, and it's the overgrown kids who are left at the picnic table, carving to their hearts' content.

To keep the creative juices flowing, Van makes a meaty black bean soup. The aroma alone is so intoxicating it has caused at least one vegetarian to succumb. Much like a witch's brew, Van concocts his recipe with a dash of this and a pinch of that. I never realized exactly how much he improvised until I tried to help him out last year.

The dried black beans had been soaking in water overnight. In the morning Van was called away. So I opened "The Silver Palette Cookbook" he had left out on the counter expressly for this purpose and followed the recipe for black bean soup, exactly.

"You followed the recipe?" he asked me later, over the phone.

"Yes, but it doesn't taste like your soup at all."

"I don't follow the recipe," he said. "I never follow the recipe."

As a child, I'm told, my husband had an independent streak. He refused to color inside the lines. He didn't follow directions. Then and now.

Van uses half the beans and twice the ham hocks. He substitutes chicken stock for water and adds Dijon mustard and tomato paste when neither is called for. The results are fantastic.

Van's soup, puréed and topped with a dollop of crème fraiche and a sprinkling of fresh chives, would make an elegant beginning to any formal dinner. But for the Halloween party, it is dinner, and he serves it chunky, in fat mugs with spoonfuls of sour cream.

Any crusty, chewy loaf of bread is the perfect accompaniment, but my favorite is Van's homemade herb bread, hot out of the oven and slathered with butter. He has a recipe for that, too, but I don't think he follows it.

Tracy Schneider lives and writes in West Seattle. Paul Schmid is a Seattle Times staff artist.