Pumpkin

So a few weeks before Halloween, Leah wants to buy a pumpkin. You - like me - might assume she's excited to make a jack-o-lantern. And then you - like me - might buy an enormous pumpkin for this purpose.

But we would both be wrong.

Because in fact we got home and she says to me: Okay. So. What can we cook with this pumpkin?

What??? Oh. Um. Crap.

WHY did I buy this ENORMOUS pumpkin???



So we cut up the pumpkin, we roasted it, and then we pureed it. And in the end we had 18 cups of pumpkin puree. Now what to cook was the question! (much of this is now in the freezer in baggies - 2 cups in each bag)

We made a pumpkin pie - that was fantastic. Pumpkin pie with fresh pumpkin has a more mild taste so if you don't normally like pumpkin pie you might give that a try some day.

We made pumpkin ginger muffins. I never did take my own picture of those. You can click to see the recipe. I didn't have any candied ginger (which I have made from scratch before but it takes 7-8 hours. I was too impatient. lol) so I used candied pecans - which I already had in my house. They were VERY good. YUM.


We made pumpkin bars - Paula Dean's recipe - recommended to my by Camela - with warning (which I found was reflected in the reviews) that it always comes out gooey in the center. To avoid this I used a 9x13 AND an 11x7 for one batch. So they were slightly thinner than intended but they came out perfectly.

So today I think I'm going to make these from Bakerella - Pumpkin Pie Bites.