Post-
Halloween we had a few
pumpkins lying around the house. I thought to myself, “
Self, what do you
think of making a pumpkin
pie from scratch?” To which I responded, “Gee, that’s a
spiff-o-riffic idea, let’s get started.”
Never having made a pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin, I consulted Betty on the proper way to do so. Betty of course, is our
cookbook. She’s nearly 45 years
old, so she hasn’t been
infected with any of
Martha Stewart’s
mind controlling elixirs of
death. To my
dismay, Betty could only provide a recipe stunningly similar to the one at the apex of this node!
Canned Pumpkin!?!?
While I realized that un-
processed food has become a concept that is decidedly
un-American, I sometimes feel it is necessary to defy the precepts of
patriotism for the over-all good of the
universe. With this in mind, I decided I would just have to figure out how to render a pumpkin down to its constituent mush without any help from the
cooking gods.
After briefly consulting Betty on techniques for cooking other
squash-like items, I took my trusty Big Pointy Knife (a must in every kitchen) in hand and set to chopping the pumpkin into little strips. In case you are wondering, this is very
therapeutic if done in a
maniacal fashion while singing “
I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay.” I then removed the orange rind and the stringy, squishy, seedy part from the pumpkin sections so that I was left with slices of the firm
fleshy
intermediate portion.
mmmm....
fleshy...
These sections I put into a 13x9x2 pan and smothered in
melted
butter and
brown sugar. I added an inch of
water to the pan, covered it with
foil and
baked it till the sections were very
soft. (temp: approximately 350 F, time: approximately 1 hour).
After the pumpkin bits were all
squishy, I drained the water and put them in a
bowl. Creeping up ever so slowly so as not to
frighten them, I ambushed the bits with a
potato masher and turned them into mush (this was the second-most-
fun part). I then drained more water out of this mush, and used it in the recipe in place of canned pumpkin in the proscribed amounts.
My
roommate called the resulting pie “the
best pumpkin pie (she) had ever had in (her) entire
life. My
friend just said it was
good.
And that friends, is how I defeated the evil factions of pre-processed pumpkin mush, and saved my
household from having one too many pumpkins and not enough pie.