I spent a long over due day in the kitchen yesterday. I’ve had three pumpkins from the mutant pumpkin plant sitting there waiting on me to decide what I was going to do with them for quite a while. So many of the bloggers I follow have been posting about roasting their pumpkins, freezing pumpkin meat and making pumpkin pies, that I finally decided yesterday was the day.
I have a confession. In the past, I’ve roasted the pumpkin seeds and either made a Jack-O-Lantern out of the pumpkin, or fed the pumpkin meat to my chickens. I’ve never roasted a pumpkin and I’ve never eaten any of the meat. Well, this year I feel I more than redeemed myself. I roasted the two smaller pumpkins and not one ounce of them went to waste.
I froze 10 quart bags of pumpkin meat and I roasted most of the seeds. Roasting pumpkin seeds is easy – separating the seeds from the pumpkin goo is not. Well, it’s really not that it’s difficult. It’s a little time consuming. I find putting the goo and seeds in a large bowl of water and then squishing all the goo between my fingers is the best method. The seeds separate, for the most part, and float to the top of the water. Once I get the seeds separated, I wash them off and remove any lingering pumpkin goo, and then let them dry on a paper towel. Once dry, I put them in a bowl, drizzle a little olive oil over them, dump on some salt, and mix it all together. Then I spread them on a covered baking pan.
I bake them at 250 for about an hour, turning them every 15 minutes or so. And when they turn golden brown, they are ready to eat. I keep them in an airtight container. I think they’ll last a couple of weeks or so like that, but they don’t usually make it that long around here.
And after the pumpkin meat was frozen and the seeds were roasted? I fed everything that was leftover to the chickens. They love anything pumpkin. And I was happy to have no waste what-so-ever.
Angie’s post motivated me to actually make a pumpkin pie with some of that pumpkin meat. That may not seem significant to you, but I’ve never cared for pumpkin pie, and I saw taking the time to make one from scratch the last ditch effort to determine if it was worth allowing these things to grow in my garden.
Pies need pie crusts, so I made four of them, and froze all but one. When I roll out my pie crust, I lay the dough on a sheet of wax paper, and place another sheet over top of it. It rolls out without sticking to the rolling pin, and when I’m finished I can either peel off the top sheet of wax paper and then use the second sheet to help put the crust in the pie pan, or I can leave both sheets on and freeze the crust that way. For the crusts I freeze, I fold the crust in half (the wax paper keeps the dough from sticking to itself), and then in half again. Like this:
Then I put them in a gallon freezer bag, and call it a day.
Well, not quite a day. I still had a pumpkin pie to make. So I mixed all the orange goo with some milk, evaporated milk, and spices and poured it into my shell.
Then I stuck it in the oven and forgot to set my timer. Argh. I’m not sure how long the pie had been baking when I finally realized I missed that little step. So I ended up poking it with a knife to test for doneness every 10 minutes or so. As a result, the finished pie was full of knife stabs and not very pretty. But do you know what? It tastes delicious! I was really pleasantly surprised that I like that pumpkin pie. Which is really good, seeing as I have a freezer full of pumpkin goo. My dad sent me a Cream Cheese Pumpkin Roll that I’m pretty excited to try.
Along with spending the day with pumpkins, I also spent a lot of time with a turkey. A 20 pound turkey, to be exact. Bernie found this fella on sale at the grocery store. Bernie’s quite the bargain shopper these days. At any rate, I roasted the turkey and we had a little of it for supper last night. I froze many bags of turkey – some for us and some to use in the home made dog food. After all the turkey was picked and frozen, I threw the carcass in a stock pot, added some seasonings and chopped onions, carrots, and celery, covered the whole thing with water and let it cook for about 3 hours. After straining, I ended up with six quarts of turkey stock in the freezer.
It was a long day in the kitchen yesterday. But as cold and rainy as it was outside, I was very happy to be there. We had the wood burner cranking out heat and the house smelled of pumpkin pie and roasted turkey.
And that huge mutant pumpkin? I’ve about decided to scoop out the seeds to roast and save a few for next year’s garden. And then I think I’ll donate the pumpkin itself to our neighbor kid so he can have the biggest Jack-O-Lantern in this neck of the woods.
So what have you been doing in your kitchen? Is your freezer full of good food? Have any pumpkin recipes you’d care to share?
