After spending at least an hour in traffic on Saturday driving to and fro the Exton Mall to purchase Christmas presents, I stopped on the way back at a Farmer's Market. Now maybe it was the pent up frustration or the heat or the sheer joy from crossing two more people off my Christmas list, but it occurred to me that I could make my own pumpkin (for pies and muffins and such). After chatting with the farmer's daughter about which pumpkins were best for this sort of thing, I walked away with 2 neck pumpkins.
Still excited over my purchase, I decided I would tackle one of the pumpkins straight away. After cutting up the entire pumpkin into bite-size chunks, I started to realize what an insane idea this was. There was no way all of this pumpkin was going to fit into my little 3-quart steamer.
I was right. It didn't. It took 3 separate batches to steam all the pumpkin chunks. Once they were all steamed, into the fridge they went to cool off so I could touch them without burning myself.
Then, the fun process of cutting the rinds off all the chunks began. The rinds were donated to my compost pile and the pumpkin got thrown into my food processor. And out came a wet, mushy mess. Although none of my old-time cookbooks mentioned straining the pumpkin afterward, I did it anyway. I'm pleased with the results.
Total amount of pumpkin extracted from 1 neck pumpkin: 3 cups. I must admit I was slightly disappointed. After all the work I put into it, I expected to get a wee bit more: something close to a lifetime supply.
I have another neck pumpkin. Will I do it again? I don't know. The pumpkin muffins did taste delicious this morning, but even dirt would taste pretty good after you added sugar, spices, and sour cream to it.
4 comments:
Marie,
They look delicious! You need someone to admire them and tell you that they taste wonderful to enable the entire process to be complete. When you can say "I made them from scratch from a pumpkin I bought from the farm, the process is complete. Usually family members are not the source of true admiration. They usually expect us to feed them and rarely recognize the difference between Pillsbury and home made. Wish I were there!
Yum, they look scrumptious and I love muffins.
Christmas shopping already? Wow, you are so way ahead of me.
I have to say, I'm from the south so I thought I'd seen every kind of produce in the US... but I've never seen a neck pumpkin. That looks like what we call a squash. :)
Ah yes, if nothing else, you get a great appreciation for canned pumkin. Here in MN we call that type squash too - looks similar to what we call butternut - very tasty.
A quick way to soften squash or pumkin is to cut in half, scrape out seeds and bake cut side down with a bit of water in bottom of tray. That is my lazy woman way anyhoo.
Glad you tried it, sounds a fun adventure.
Post a Comment