A plethora of pumpkins

This was my most successful year growing pumpkins, and it was more fun growing them at home in my own backyard garden rather than at a rental plot 30 minutes away! But now that Halloween's over (and wow, I've completely forgotten to go and post pics/videos of the outside of the house!), what to do with all the pumpkins!? Well, some I've unloaded on others. Friends at work have taken some for cooking, or for roasting the seeds. A neighbor down the street has taken some, lopped off the top, and is apparently using them as a vase for fall flowers! Me? I decided to take three of them, and see what would happen if I roasted 'em up.

These "peanut pumpkins" are supposed to be very flavorful.... Here's what they look like before I took the cleaver and mallet to 'em!

And here's the innards of one of them, before I scooped out the seeds. I didn't save the seeds - I don't get into chewing on the roasted seeds IN-SHELL and then either picking it out of my mouth, or eating all of it. I'm sorry, but I think my digestive track would rather I ate gravel! If I want to eat pumpkin seeds, I buy 'em already shelled at the bulk food store.

I DO need to make sure I save the seeds from one of these peanut pumpkins for growing next year. These seeds here went out for the critters. The chipmunk really loves 'em, while the birds don't seem to care for them. Probably too big.

So Finny had done something like this last year and had a bunch of feedback from people on her blog - so I took the combined advice and tried adding some water to the roasting pan (just like with any winter squash). Even at 400 it still took just over 2 hrs before these guys were nice and tender so that I could stick a fork in 'em.

And what did I get from these three pumpkins? LOTS of water for one thing. After scooping out all the flesh into a laaaarge stainless steel bowl, water just kept seeping out of them. I finally put 'em in a strainer for awhile - I know at least 4 cups of water went down the drain. And after all that I still had over 16 lbs of pumpkin! Oy!

That's alotta fiber!

And since no one's going to want to eat something with blobs of pumpkin it in, I hit the orange mass with my immersion blender, which turned it into a nice puree. Now the question is - how would this homegrown/pureed pumpkin compare to the canned stuff? Let's find out!! I hadn't made pumpkin bread in aaaages, and so searched on line for one...

I made a batch of pumpkin bread with canned pumpkin, and a batch with homegrown. I made sure ALL measurements were exactly the same. I even mixed ALL the eggs together for both recipes, and then split the combined, stirred eggs - just to ensure each recipe had the same yolk/white ratio.

Boy do these look very different! In this picture, the canned pumpkin is on the right, the homegrown on the left. Unfortunately the homegrown STILL was plenty watery, and didn't have that rich dark orange color...

While the pumpkin breads were baking, I tried ANOTHER pumpkin recipe, which was inspired by an attempt that Finny hadn't been so happy with (she left out the sausage, and I decided to give it a go WITH the sausage in the recipe). So here's a creamy pumpkin and sausage sauce to put over pasta:

While that simmered, the bread loaves came out of the oven. I forgot to point out above that each batch of pumpkin bread makes TWO loaves....so yeah, i was gonna have four loaves of pumpkin bread. Thankfully it's the season for this sorta thing, AND people at work will eat almost anything! First are the two loaves made with the canned pumpkin - this looks more like what you'd expect. Smooth top, maybe a little crack, nice color....

And the homegrown pumpkin? Considering it had so much wetness to the batter, I really thought it would take a lot longer to cook. Instead it looks like it could've come out of the oven EARLIER... The finished product was darker, stuck to the bottom of the pans a little (even though I'd sprayed oil/flour in the bottom of the pans), and seemed a bit more dense. Bummer. I honestly preferred the canned pumpkin over the homegrown in this recipe for looks....

Would I have worried about this if I DIDN'T have two versions side-by-side? Nope! Did they both taste good? Yup!! And I took both varieties in to work, pointing out which was which. People said they either didn't really notice a difference, or some said they liked the homegrown better (most likely because, hey, you know it's partly homegrown!?).

Now aside from making the bread and the sauce, I still had A LOT of pumpkin left over. Turns out pumpkin's GREAT for feeding your pets, especially if they're having "intestinal issues" - and Doogie had been running a little on the soft side lately (probably too many carrots?). What we've found works GREAT is to stuff some little treats (broken up biscuits, frozen banana slices, etc) into his stuffable toys, then fill all the remaining space with pumpkin, toss the toys in a gallon bag, and throw that in the freezer! It takes him FOREVER to get all the way through a chunk of frozen pumpkin with other goodies in it - perfect for our dinner/TV time!

And even after 2 cups of the pumpkin puree went to Doogie toys or sat in the fridge for loading up more toys later, I still had EIGHT bags for the freezer, each filled with 2 cups of pumpkin puree. I came across a recipe awhile back for pumpkin dog biscuits, so I might make some of those soon. And I'm sure I'll have to try a pumpkin pie, or more pumpkin bread soon.

Oh, and the pumpkin and sausage cream sauce for pasta? Well, the picture didn't turn out all that great, but it was goooooood! I HIGHLY recommend it!!