Pumpkin Adventure

There's a lot of buzz around the blogosphere about pumpkin puree. People add it to all kinds of food to up the fiber and decrease the fat. I've always been a little curious, but never done anything about it.

I have also read that you can make your own pumpkin puree. Buy a pie pumpkin, cook it, and whiz it in the food processor. Sounds easy enough, right?

WRONG!

I have been seeing pie/sugar pumpkins at the grocery store for weeks now and have been intrigued by them. They met my produce standard of less than $1 per pound (78 cents, to be exact), so I bought one yesterday. Apparently I was a bit over-zealous in my desire to be productive over my 4-day weekend. I thought "I'll cook it and puree it and freeze it to use in so many delicious, healthy recipes."

Yeah. Sure you will.

The trouble started with me mis-reading the produce scale. I guess when both kids are talking/screaming at you, it is hard to pay close attention to the weight of fruit. So when the cashier rang it up, it was $2.64 for a 3.4 lb pumpkin. That's accurate, but it was more than I was expecting and it wasn't the "great deal" I thought it was.

So I brought the beast home and ignored it until the kids were napping. Then I went Googling and found this site, which walked me through how to cook this thing. Step one: cut the pumpkin in half. Easier said than done. I don't know if pie pumpkins are naturally tougher than jack o'lantern pumpkins, but I could not chop into that thing to save my life! I tried 3 different knives, 2 of our pumpkin carving knives (one of which snapped right in half as I tried to saw with it) and even brought in the saw from the garage!!! Nothing would penetrate the fortress of pumpkin.

Clever girl that I am, I thought "I've seen smashed pumpkin in the streets before--I'll take it out to the deck and give it a good whack." I tried holding it and smashing it on our deck railing. Nothing. Not even a dent. Finally, I went Planet of the Apes style and smashed the pumpkin on the edge of the concrete step. Bingo! It cracked, I hit it again, and then pried it apart with my hands. I'm guessing I looked pretty stupid out there.

I brought the destroyed fruit back into the house, scraped it clean, and put it on the pan to bake. This was the best part, as our house smelled amazing for about an hour while it cooked.

I scraped the soft pumpkin flesh into the blender and started to whiz it. This made both children cry (naptime was LONG over by this point), and it didn't really work. Not enough moisture in the blender to make anything move. So there I am, blending and pushing the pumpkin around with a rubber spatula, listening to my kids cry, when I push the spatula down too far and the blender blade chops off a half-inch chunk of rubber. Great. Now my labor of love has been tainted with green rubber bits. I wasn't about to give up (I had invested WAY too much time and money), so I poked around and (hopefully!) removed all the bits.

Now it was time to see the fruits of my labor. I got a few containers out and started measuring the pumpkin. What was my yield? The equivalent of 1 and a half cans of pumpkin. All that work to save, like, 20 cents over buying the *(&#!@ stuff.

Never again, pumpkin. Never again.

I even tried roasting the seeds--they taste like unpopped popcorn. Gross.

Lesson learned: Sometimes, making it yourself just isn't worth it. Also, it was a blessing in disguise that my pumpkin vines didn't produce anything. I could've been staring at a pile of pumpkins to process :)