Spaghetti with Pumpkin Sauce / Spaghetti mit Kürbissauce

This recipe clearly doesn't know where it's heading. I mean, pumpkin, balsamic vinegar, cayenne pepper and oregano?

I decided to give this recipe a try because I enjoyed making it when I was a student - though my notes reveal that I had been savvy enough back then to omit the unbefitting ingredients - no cayenne, no vinegar, no oregano, not even tomatoes. I decided to stick a little closer to the original to find out if it was worth it.

Unfortunately, it was not. I started by adding only 1/4 teaspoon of (dark) balsamic vinegar (I didn''t have white one) - that was already way over the top. Just imagine I had added the whole tablespoon, 12 times as much. The tablespoonful of tomato concentrate wasn't helpful either; together with the balsamic vinegar, it made any flavour the pumpkin could have brought in recede to the background. The cayenne pepper in itself wasn't a bad idea, if that's what you want to do, but for heaven's sake don't combine it with oregano! Last, while adding tomatoes is in itself not such a bad idea, adding them raw and leaving them uncooked is.

I think the basic idea of this recipe does have some merit. This is what I would probably do: Fry cubes of pumpkin, onion, garlic (2 cloves or more!) and tomato, cook until soft in white wine and/or stock, give it a very, very short whizz in the kitchen machine so it retains some structure, then add salt, pepper and milk products (crème fraîche, milk, cream, you choose) and serve. Alternatively, add fried bacon cubes for texture and to balance the naturally sweet pumpkin.