Pumpkin Session

This summer, on a whim, I picked up some pumpkin starts down at Joe's Garden, a small local farm located inside of the city. I was already planning to plunk some zucchini into an area I had reclaimed from the blackberries, and I figured pumpkins would do just as well.

The pumpkins are behind the zucchini plant, but they look the same at this point.

It took some dedicated watering, but the pumpkins started to grow. Then I went on vacation. And came back to this:

Pumpkin vine says "OM NOM NOM"

You can see our compost bin over there, being eaten by vines. Soon, I had four little green pumpkins on the vine, that started turning orange in September.

About two weeks before Halloween, I had picked two of the pumpkins and was waiting on the last two to ripen when one night, when the streets were ringing with the calls of drunk college students, someone stole one right off the vine. (The largest one of course.)

So I had three pumpkins that I promptly stuck on the balcony, out of the reach of any more pumpkin-smashers. I finally got around to processing them this weekend, just in time to completely miss thanksgiving. =)

The empty shell.  It was devoured.

I used this recipe to make a really tasty soup, made inside of a whole pumpkin. I didn't get any pictures of it full, unfortunately, so you'll just have to imagine a whole pumpkin filled with an onion, apple, chicken stock, cream and goat cheese, that was then blended inside of the pumpkin itself with some of the flesh of that pumpkin. Delicious.

Cooked and ready for the fridge.

While that was cooking, I split open my other two pumpkins and laid them on a sheet pan to cook a la Alton Brown. Cooked them for 50 minutes, then stuck them in the fridge to cool and then forgot about them for the next day and a half. Hahahaha.

The flesh was easily scooped out with a spoon.

This morning, I got them out, scooped out the flesh and stuffed it in the blender. With four pumpkin halves to process, it took four rounds in the blender, and then a little bit of extra help from the stick blender.

I bagged the puree and froze it in 16-oz portions, the perfect size for one pie. I got four portions out of two pumpkins, and a full half-sheet pan of seeds that I toasted up with some soy sauce and salt. Yum!

If I tried, I could probably make some very local pies out of this puree. Eggs from someone's backyard chickens, Twin Brook milk and cream for both the custard and the whipped cream. I could get some Bob's Red Mill flour and Tillamook butter for the crust, and if I were feeling really ambitious I could probably get the spices from the Spice Hut out on the Guide. Well, its unlikely that I'll go that far, but at least when we cook our extra turkey I'll be able to make a pie with my own puree.

That is a lot of puree for two little pumpkins! It tasted almost exactly like butternut squash.