Savory baked gourd with tomatoes

Ingredients:

* 1 long Kikinda competition strain edible gourd (at least a couple inches in diameter), sliced
* The equivalent of about five medium-sized tomatoes, cut up
* Lots of summer savory, both leaves and stalks (if you don't think it's too much, it's probably not enough)
* Parsley
* Cayenne pepper
* 3 Aji Habanero peppers, cut up, including the calyxes
* Onion powder
* Black pepper
* A fair amount of Tajin seasoning
* Avocado oil
* Cheddar cheese

Oil the pan with avocado oil.

Other than the cheese, mix the rest of the contents into a 15" cast-iron skillet. Bake it uncovered at 500° F. for about 40 minutes. Yes, that is not too hot for the gourd.

When the time is nearly complete, add cheddar cheese to melt on top.

Let sit for a little while before eating.

The result tastes much like lasagna. There's a lot of umami flavor in it.

Warning: The lack of garlic is purposeful. It is not needed. If you use garlic you didn't use my recipe. Just for the record, I like garlic, and it may or may not go well with gourds, but in my opinion, it does not go well with squash unless it is cooked separately and mingled in after cooking. Yes, I know that the gourds in this recipe are not squash, but I also know they're related to squash.

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I made the dish again, today, but I found some ambiguity in my recipe: Do I just oil the pan with avacado oil, or do I also drizzle it on top of all the ingredients (except the cheese) before baking? I didn't drizzle the oil, this time, because I didn't think about it until after it was done (but I sure would have had I thought about it sooner).

Also, I discovered that my gourd this year looked, smelled, tasted and felt different (all raw). It was perhaps a bit older than previous gourds I had tried; so, I seeded it before adding it to the pan. Anyway, I hope it still tastes good. It looked like it had softer, juicier, mushier (but not mushy) flesh. It smelled like a certain cleaner, a bit, instead of smelling how gourd leaves smell/vines.

Additionally, my summer savory had gone to seed and smelled a lot more like menthol, much as oregano is prone to smell. But, I added a lot of it anyway. Unlike ladt time, I cooked it the full forty minutes before adding cheese, and I didn't let the cheese get at all crispy.

I added an extra Aji Habanero pepper, since the gourd filled the pan a lot.

So, if this doesn't work out, then I'll have to try it with a younger gourd and summer savory such as I used last year (which possibly had already dropped its seeds).

Now it's just sitting for a while. It tastes better if you let it sit for a while after cooking before eating.

Okay, the moment of truth said that the recipe still worked, but that I needed more cheese. I'm pretty impressed that the massive amount of summer savory I used wasn't too much. It's a miracle.

I removed the food from the cast-iron pan so that the acidic juices of the tomatoes wouldn't interact with the cast-iron further.

Yes, I prefer the dish using a younger gourd, and perhaps somewhat less summer savory, but it's still good this way. Most importantly, it didn't taste like menthol.