Stephanie's Projects: Tis the season for Punpkins

This is a first for me. I never really thought about making my own pumpkin puree until I saw the cute, little pie pumpkins at Trader Joe's. I ended up getting a few more pumpkins from Freecycle (yea!) and so made a giant batch of 7 pie pumpkins. Ambitious… I realized this about half way through the process.

Even though this is my first pumpkin cooking journey, I figured it was worth writing about and I have no idea when I will do this again.

Before I heated the oven I did my research. There are a few ways to get the good stuff. You can cut it up and stick it in the oven. You can chop it up and toss it into a slow cooker. Or you can do what I did… simply deposit the pumpkins into the oven.

Before

After

The simple way, or so it seemed. I coated the pumpkins with coconut oil and put them in there at 400 degrees. It took a little over an hour but then they cut like butter and the seeds just fell out with only a little scraping.

I set up with the cutting board area. A little bowl for the seeds (planning on roasting them later) and a huge bowl for the flesh of the pumpkins. Separating the seeds from the hot stringy goop was the part that took a long time and made quite a mess. Every time I had to stop I had to scrub my whole arms.

I noticed that the smaller the pumpkin, the more seeds and water there was.

When I was done cutting up the pumpkins I looked online again. I noticed that each website I came across used either a blender or a food processor to puree the stuff. What a mess! I decided to use my immersion blender. Much easier I think.

Looking at the puree, I decided that I needed to strain the orange puree. I know you can use a paper towel, but I just happen to have had some new cheesecloth. I rigged up a bowl with a large colander (I rarely use this but it sure comes in handy to have!) containing the cheesecloth. Once I had the pumpkin inside, I covered it with foil and stuck it in the refrigerator overnight.

In the Fridge on top of my batch of Granola Bars

Please note that I started this process at 3pm Sunday with a brief pause for dinner and putting kids in the shower and bed, I finally stuck the puree in the refrigerator at 8pm.

I picked this up again the next day.

I took the juice and saved it in a jar. I ended up using some of it in place of water in a batch of pancakes. No need to let the nutrition go to waste...

Check out all this juice!

I started portioning out the pumpkin for freezing. I find it very interesting that pumpkin cannot be home canned...

Plus extra for pie!

Double bagged for the freezer.

My husband saw what I was doing and asked for pumpkin pie… so I ended up with 6 portions to freeze and 2 pumpkin pies (that were really good! And surprisingly easy to make).

One pie did not last long. I mixed a couple recipes that I found on allrecipes with one I found from Paula Dean. It is a really good thing I made the other one to freeze for latter!