Adventures with Pumpkins

My first adventure/experience with a Cinderella pumpkin needed to be told in pictures. I've never used a pumpkin for anything more than a jack-o-lantern (although this year was the first time I'd personally ever carved one - I usually just draw a face or John does the carving), so I decided to document my afternoon with the Cinderella pumpkin. It may just look like a big ugly pumpkin at first, but as I cut into it, I grew to love this variety of pumpkin. The color is fabulous, the pumpkin "meat" is juicy, and it will provide us with plenty of new and interesting dishes.
I bought the Cinderella pumpkin for $5 when we went to Baggenstos early in October, purely because I wanted to try my hand at making a homemade pumpkin pie. Little did I know how much I'd actually get out of one pumpkin. So what began as a "why not?" sort of thing quickly turned into the beginning of a fall tradition. And here's your introduction to the fabulous Cinderella pumpkin adventure:

This is how it began. Short, squat, and not all that pretty. There was a certain cuteness to it though.
I began by cutting it (using all the arm strength I could manage - these things are tough!) into four sections.

I highly recommend enlarging this photo (just click on it). The beads of "juice" coming off this pumpkin were just beautiful on top of the gorgeous pumpkin color. And look at how thick the pumpkin "meat" is!

Sorry this turned out a little dark. I cut it into a few more sections to allow me to scrape out the seeds. As you can see by the bowl, there were a lot!

After I scraped out the seeds, I placed the pumpkin sections on cookie sheets and they went into a 350 degree oven for probably about an hour.

After they cooked and cooled for a few minutes, I scraped all the pumpkin I could off and put it straight into the blender. I pureed the pumpkin until there were no lumps and it was totally smooth. Honestly, it really does look like a smoothie, but I don't know how great a pumpkin smoothie would be. There's probably a recipe out there somewhere!

The small stack of skins left after being scraped clean.

After all the pureeing, we ended up with a grand total of 17 cups of pumpkin puree! Just from one pumpkin! I separated them into 2 cup sections to use for individual recipes and placed them in the freezer. I realized that this is probably the sort of thing that is better if you have an additional storage fridge in your garage, as our freezer is being overrun with pumpkin puree.

To use, I just defrost the puree in the same bag overnight in the fridge.

My first creation with pumpkin puree: Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins!

I used a recipe that called for 1 can, so it was just 2 cups/one bag of puree. It made 30 muffins! The batter was dense and the apartment was filled with a fantastic pumpkin smell as they baked. They were a huge hit with the boys and I'm looking forward to making pumpkin bread for Thanksgiving.

This was a great experience and I'm actually surprised at how much I enjoyed it. To get 17 cups out of a $5 pumpkin was amazing and a huge savings over buying canned pumpkin. You'd get about 4 cups from $5 worth of canned. For anyone who is interested, here is the recipe for the muffins: http://southernfood.about.com/od/muffinrecipes/r/r90122d.htm

Like I said, it does call for 1 can of pumpkin, but I used 2 cups of puree.

We may just have to grow our own pumpkins once we finally have some yard space!