Sausage and Wild Rice Dinner in a Pumpkin
A whole pie pumpkin stuffed with sausage, rice, and herbs, buried in coals until the walls go soft.
- calories
- 520
- weight
- 14 oz
- cal / oz
- 37
- protein
- 22 g
- serves
- 6, scales
- prep
- 25 min
- cook
- 70 min
- total time
- 95 min
- water
- 500 ml boiled
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Dinner
- Dutch oven
- Campfire coals
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Dairy free
- Gluten free
- Nut free
- One pot
- Pre-mix at home
- Needs a cooler
- Actual cooking
Ingredients
| Pie pumpkin | 1 small, about 4 lb | the sugar kind, not a carving pumpkin |
|---|---|---|
| Italian sausage | 1 lb | casings pulled off; keep it cold in the cooler |
| Yellow onion | 1 medium, diced | |
| Red bell pepper | 1, diced | |
| Carrot | 1 large, diced | |
| Celery | 2 ribs, diced | |
| Garlic | 3 cloves, minced | |
| Wild rice blend | 1 cup dry | cook at home or in camp before you start |
| Dried thyme, rosemary, and sage | 1 tsp each | |
| Kosher salt and cracked black pepper | to taste | |
| Cooking oil | 1 tbsp |
Method
- If the rice is not already cooked, simmer 1 cup of wild rice blend in about 500 ml of boiled water until tender, then set it aside. Do this first so the pot is free.
- Cut a wide lid off the pumpkin around the stem. Scrape the seeds and strings out until the inside walls are smooth. Salt and pepper the cavity.
- Build a fire and let it burn down to coals. You want steady heat, not flames.
- Brown the sausage in the dutch oven over the coals, breaking it up as it goes. Pour off most of the fat.
- Add onion, carrot, celery, and bell pepper. Cook 8 to 10 minutes until they give up their water. Stir in garlic, herbs, salt, and pepper, then fold in the rice.
- Pack the filling into the pumpkin, set the lid back on, and put the whole pumpkin in the dutch oven. Coals underneath, more on the lid.
- Bake 50 to 60 minutes. It is done when a fork slides into the pumpkin wall without argument.
- Spoon out filling and scrape pumpkin flesh off the walls with each serving. The pumpkin is the vegetable, not the dish.
This is a car-camping recipe because a four-pound pumpkin is not a backpacking item. It earns the weight by being the pot: the pumpkin steams itself from the inside, and the walls soften into something you scrape off and eat with the filling. Nothing is wasted and nothing else gets dirty.
The original goes in a home oven, which a dutch oven over coals imitates well enough if you keep coals on the lid as well as under it. Two things travel badly here, so handle them at home: cook the wild rice before you leave and freeze it, and keep the sausage cold until it hits the pot. Everything else in the list is dry, shelf-stable, or a root vegetable that does not care.
Packing
Dice the onion, pepper, carrot, and celery at home and bag them together. Cook the rice at home too and freeze it flat in a bag; it thaws in the cooler and doubles as an ice block. Premix the three herbs with the salt and pepper in a film canister.
Variations
- Any rice or quinoa works. Wild rice just holds its shape better after an hour in the oven.
- No dutch oven: wrap the whole pumpkin in two layers of foil and set it directly in the coals, rotating every 15 minutes.
- Swap the sausage for a can of drained lentils and a heavy hand with the herbs. Add oil back, since the sausage fat was doing the carrying.
https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/dinner-in-a-pumpkin-2