Yesterday I stopped at a farm stand for flowers. To the right of the door were pumpkins marked, "Field Pumpkins." To the left were smaller pumpkins with a sign, "Sugar Pumpkins." Those are the ones for cooking.....hmm.....
One of the cool things about blogging is that it forces me to get creative, to think ahead....and then I wind up having way too much fun in the process. I did have other work to do, like putting vocabulary and comprehension questions onto the computer for student use tomorrow, but that got done while pumpkin-y delights were in the oven. It tends to all work out in the end, especially since I'm fairly organized and do things in steps.
Here is the pumpkin I brought home. It was about three pounds.
I scraped out all the seeds and stringy stuff with a spoon. I found out afterwards that an ice cream scoop works well with this. That sounds like a good idea; will try it next time.
The pumpkin halves were placed cut-side-down in a lightly greased baking dish. I baked them at 375 for an hour. They came out looking a little funky:
I let them cool a bit, so that I could handle them and scrape out the insides. The one on the above right is slightly scraped out. I wound up with 3 cups of pumpkin!
Now what to do....?
I suddenly realized that I had the perfect recipe, based on one from the Moosewood Cookbook. Gosh, that book was my standard in the early 80's.
We called it, "Pumpkin Pie, Unwrapped." Here's what I did:
I put the following into a large bowl:
My 3 cups of cooked pumpkin,
2/3 cup honey,
2 Tbs molasses,
1/4 tsp ground clove,
2 tsp cinnamon,
1/2 tsp salt,
4 eggs, and
1 12-oz can evaporated milk.
I used my hand blender to puree the whole thing.
I poured most of it into a large pie pan, lightly greased. The rest went into my 6-inch cast iron skillet, which was also lightly greased. I had already preheated the oven to 450, but turned it down to 350 when I placed the two pans into the oven.
The 6-inch pan took about 45 minutes to be done (test with a knife near the center, it should come out clean).
The pie pan took 60 minutes.
They looked like this:
The little one was nice as a little snack, but it didn't look as pretty once I pulled it out of the pan. (Don't store food in your cast iron skillet!) As for flavor, however, these are much more tasty than the pumpkin dessert I made on October 11th. Perhaps it's the honey; perhaps it's the fresh pumpkin...
