Yums From the Pumpkin Patch

-


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 chopped them and roasted them. Here is my what I found out. 


Pumpkin 1 was a dark red-orange, flat and the skin was fairly smooth. It had a full 2 inches of flesh under the skin. Roasted it was very sweet, but had a very light pumpkin flavor. The roasted flesh was a deep red orange, and the roasted flesh was fairly wet. 


Pumpkin 2 was green. It was very weirdly shaped, looking like a twisted face. It had 3 inches of flesh under the skin in places. The seed cavity was small. Roasted, the color was yellow orange and it was less sweet but had more pumpkin flavor. 


Pumpkin 3 was orange/white and the skin had the texture of a cantaloupe. It had 2 inches of flesh under the skin. It roasted very dry and solid. It had no stringiness and was hard to puree. It roasted a deep orange color and was medium sweet and “pumpkin-y.


The fourth pumpkin was very similar to very similar to the first one, but a little sweeter. 

All of these pumpkins roasted well and would be great in any of your pumpkin recipes. Next time I will go for a whiter one and not be put off if the skin was a little mottled. 

Here are a few recipe suggestions: 

Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkin Pasta

Pumpkin Bread


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One Pot Meals – Pasta

-
Image
The thing about One Pot Meals is that frequently they aren’t. They have you cook the sauce in a pot then boil the pasta in a pot. Or they cook the meat in a skillet then add it to the sauce in a pan.  My goal was to make truly one pot meals. There will always be a few other tools like a knife and cutting board, bowl for marinade or cut up veggies, a measuring cup if one is needed, etc.  I also want to be able to walk into the kitchen and put a meal together in about 30 minutes. So here is how it starts. I looked into my veggie drawer and found zucchini, half an onion, some chopped garlic and a package of mushrooms. I also had some frozen pesto from last fall and a jar of capers. All those things pretty much defined the sauce.  But say my veggie drawer didn’t have zucchini and mushrooms. I could do pretty much the same things with a bag of frozen peas and carrots. (If your kitchen doesn’t have onions and garlic – it’s past time you made a grocery store run!!) For the prote...
Read more

The Sheet-pan Trend

-
Image
I didn’t intend to be trendy. I really just wanted to do fewer dishes. It seemed reasonable to cook an entire meal on one sheet pan. Who knew that sheet pan meals were going to become the new trend? If you look around on the Internet, you’ll see all kinds of sheet pan meal recipes. People are putting all their vegetables and potatoes and meats on one pan and cooking them together. Then, one pan to wash!! In fact, if you walk down the freezer aisle at the grocery store you can find a line from Birds Eye. They come in a bag and are called Sheet Pan or Oven Bake meals.  But the concept is pretty simple, and is easily tailored to what’s in your fridge for supper. I have done this with many kinds of meats and veggies. The trick is to think about how long you would usually roast each component then do a little math. The longest cooked item goes in first. When the remaining time is how long you want to cook the next thing, add that. Continue in this way until everything is in. I season ea...
Read more

Pumpkin Brownies

-
Image
Some of you may remember the pumpkin project last fall. I ended up with a freezer full of pumpkin purée. Recently I finally got to use most of what I had left by making pumpkin brownies for a bake sale. They were really good and very easy to do. I have written about my opinion regarding box cake mixes . I really think they are one of the great Food Science masterpieces of our times. So in this case I started with a simple box brownie mix. The one I used was the plain one from ALDIs. It called for water, oil and eggs to be added.  Home puréed pumpkin is wetter than canned pumpkin, so I substituted one cup of my frozen pumpkin for both the oil and water. It was brownie mix, 1 cup frozen pumpkin puree, and two eggs.  I did a trial recipe to see if it was going to work using a 9x13 pan. They were too thin and the texture was a little stoggy. So I used a 9x9 pan and added a tsp of baking powder to the powdered mix.  I baked them according to the package times and to an intern...
Read more