How Do You Like My Pumpkins?

I know that pumpkin season ended when roving bands of teenagers went around and smashed everybody’s, but we just finished cooking off the last of ours, and I figured that I would put together a little how-to guide. Anything for an excuse to take pictures of me holding a giant knife.

The first thing you need is a couple of pumpkins. You want to make sure that you buy sugar pumpkins, which are grown for their qualities of being delicious and not carving pumpkins, which are grown for the quality of being ginormous. Sugar pumpkins are fairly small, so I like to cook several at once. You’ll probably only get a couple of cups of cooked pumpkin out of each raw sugar pumpkin.

As you can see, I Heart Somerville.

The first thing to do is to get a butcher knife and cut the pumpkins in half. Oh, and preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

It’s probably overkill to dress up like Norman Bates’ Mother and go after the pumpkins in the shower.

You want to cut the pumpkins crosswise.

Not pictured: the Finger I Sliced Open Last Time I Used that Knife

If you have a tendency to cut yourself by accident when using knives, it’s perfectly acceptable to use a stunt double.

Once your stunt double has cut the pumpkins in half, take a picture of the pumpkin innards and then hand him back the camera.

Take a spoon and scoop out the seeds and string. Leave the meat intact.

PSA: Pumpkin innards are gross.

Once you’ve scooped out the grossness, put the the pumpkins (shell side up) on a baking tray.

Put the pumpkins in the oven and cook them for an hour.

While you’re waiting for the pumpkins to finish cooking, you can do something fun, like a line of coke!

As you can see, I don’t know my nose from my cheek.

Just kidding, I made apple pie.

Ding! Pumpkin’s done!

Take the pumpkins out of the oven and let them cool, lest you burn your fingers. You want to make sure that they are still warm, however, as that will make it easier to scoop them out. Take out your handy dandy spoon again and scoop out all of the pumpkin meat into a bowl.

Mmm… pumpkinliscious.

Once you scoop all of the meat out of the shell, you want to blend it all up. You can use a blender, a masher, a ricer or my favorite… a stick blender!

Making faces helps with the blending.

Mmm…. that’s squishy.

Once the pumpkin is all blended up, you’re pretty much done. You can use it for all sorts of tasty baked goodness like pie, cupcakes or pumpkin bread. I like to make enough pumpkin to use later. I measure out one cup at a time into a ziploc bag. That way you can unfreeze one at a time without having to unthaw all of it. If you pre-measure it, you can unthaw one bag for each cup you need.

Or, you know, you can always just buy a can of Aunt Libby’s. But I think that my way is more fun.