Cooking Punkin'

Probably everybody already knows how to cook pumpkin in preparation for pumpkin pie or pumpkin bread, but it's new to me, so I'll blog it.  I saw these pumpkins at Brookshires, had a moment of feeling all domestic and thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be great to make pumpkin pies from real pumpkins instead of from a can?"  So, I bought them and let them sit in the breezeway for weeks while they accused me of being a fraud every time I walked by them...which was several times a day.

Pffft.  Who wants to go to all the trouble of cooking a pumpkin when you can buy perfectly good pumpkin in a can?  What was I thinking?  But, I bought them, so I must use them and today was the day.

I sat down and googled "cooking pumpkin".  Amazingly, or not, many sites already tell us how to cook pumpkins, so nobody really needs me to tell them how.  I do, however, have a couple of recommendations at the end.  These sites also tell us that, "Once you go fresh, you'll never go back to canned". 

So, here we go...goin' fresh.

I cut the pumpkins in half and scooped out the seeds and stringy stuff.

Reserved the seeds for roasting later.  Yum.

I found instructions for boiling, steaming, or roasting.  I didn't know which was better, but I thought that if I boiled them, the pumpkins would soak up water resulting in runny pumpkin mash.  So I decided on steaming one and roasting the other.

To roast, just cover with foil and pop into a 375 degree oven for about an hour and half or until soft.  I didn't put mine on a pan, but would recommend it because it did drip some juice onto the oven floor.

I left the pumpkin in the oven until it cooled off, then took it out and scooped the pulp out of the skin.  I mashed the pulp with a potato masher.

To steam the other pumpkin, I cut it into slices, then peeled it.  I used my steamer basket in my large stock pot, tossed all the pieces in there and let it steam for about an hour.  When it cooled, I mashed it with a potato masher.

NOTE:  When peeling the pumpkin, I thought the skin was very thick, so I peeled away quite a bit, maybe an eighth of an inch or so.  But after scooping the pulp out of the roasted pumpkin, I discovered that the skin is not nearly as thick as I thought.  So, when peeling the pumpkin, peeling it as if peeling a potato should be sufficient.

I put all the pumpkin into containers, labeled them and put them in the freezer.

What I learned:  Roasting is way easier.  It was a pain in the neck and took a long time to slice and peel the pumpkin as compared to simply popping it into the oven and the result was the same.

Next up...canning jalapenos.