Holt Cuisine

I see that lots of people still have their Thanksgiving pumpkins sitting around, and some of them might still be good for roasting. Here are some of my conclusions:  1. A squished looking pumpkin is best. These seem to have smaller seed cavities and more flesh.  2. A round, jack-o-lantern friendly pumpkin is more likely to have thin, stringy flesh.  3. Even a thick skin pumpkin can be a little stringy, but the food processor will take care of that.  Here is another thing I found that was helpful. I bought these on Amazon. They are silicone and allow you to freeze things in one cup portions. I froze the last pumpkin puree like this and it really helped on freezer space. I’m looking forward to using them the next time I make broth. I think broth in 1 cup blocks will be very useful.  A friend asked me if I was missing the North Carolina Candy Roaster pumpkin. I will say that the Candy Roaster pretty much had it all – thick flesh, firm but not stringy, and swe...

For the past few weeks our church has been doing a pumpkin patch. There were all kinds of pumpkins and gourds. As the weeks went by if became plain that there were going to be a bunch of pumpkins leftover. Apparently, that is usually expected and of course that made me wonder if you could eat them.  Up until a few years ago, the only time I had ever tried to roast a pumpkin I used a standard carving pumpkin. It was stringy, pale and tasteless, so I went back to the can. While we lived in North Carolina we had access to the Candy Roaster. This vegetable changed the way I think of fresh pumpkin partially because it looks more like a squash than a pumpkin, but also because, roasted it was so much better than canned pumpkin! But would anything in the pumpkin patch be that good?  I read a couple of articles that indicated that the fancy heirloom type pumpkin were best for eating, so I decided to try a few to find out.  The picture above shows the pumpkins I brought home. We ch...