Harvesting Pumpkins

This past weekend was the last weekend the Midtown Farmer's Market would be open, so Andy and I thought we'd swing by and see what we could see. We rode our bikes over since it was a wonderful day. Once there we saw lots of delightful foods available, so we made some purchases and we rode home with 2 pumpkins, a bunch of potatoes, pork chops, carrots and lettuce.

This is what Andy did with his pumpkin. He got lots of compliments from trick or treaters.

I used a bigger knife on my pumpkin.

Earlier this fall I decided I wanted to make something with pumpkin from a real pumpkin, not out of can. So today was the day and I made a pumpkin pie! It was an interesting experience, especially since our cheap blender sucks and a food processor would have worked a million times better for pureeing the pumpkin stuff.

But first I had cut open the pumpkin, which was a task. The directions in the old version of The Joy of Cooking instruct you to "hack" the pumpkin into 4 inch pieces. Hack I did. Next I roasted the hacked up pieces for a good while. Then I scraped off the soft flesh and then "processed" it so it wouldn't be stringy. This is me scraping my roasted pumpkin pieces.

After the frustrating experience with the blender, everything else worked out pretty well. The pumpkin pie turned out great! Though I wouldn't recommend listening to how The Joy of Cooking tells you to check how it's done, sticking a knife in the center would work much better.

This is what I came up with today after an afternoon spent hacking, scraping, whisking and baking. On the bottom is the pumpkin pie, above that is extra puree for pumpkin muffins and on top pumpkin seeds to be roasted later.

But you can't eat pumpkin pie without whipped cream! We didn't have any cool whip on hand, but I had leftover heavy whipping cream from the pie, so I whipped up some whip cream. It's fast, easy and delicious!

Here's the finished product (with a bite missing)!

Overall, my making a pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin experience was a lot of fun and I got to try out some new things. I learned more about baking and took the first tentative step to cooking with winter squash. Also, I learned that it's helpful to have the right tools in the kitchen. Sometimes improvising with what you have works well, like using coffee filters to strain the pumpkin puree instead of cheesecloth. But other times, a blender just doesn't do the trick.