Yesterday my day revolved around my cursed pumpkins. I haven't had much luck with them from the start. The pumpkin plants almost died when I planted them, then they grew out of control and took over part of my tomatoes. I had over 40 blossoms and lots of little pumpkins start but the stinking bugs in my garden decided to eat all but two. Fortunately there is only 2 people in our house so both of us were able to carve a pumpkin. I wanted to use the pumpkins for puree so to keep them fresh we carved them late Saturday afternoon and I think they turned out pretty good if I do say so myself.
Even with all the wind and rain we had on Saturday night they stayed lit and looked pretty cool.
Yesterday I had decided I needed to get the pumpkins taken care of before they started to go bad. I love pumpkin cookies and pumpkin rolls and basically anything pumpkin at this time of the year and I figured I had these two pumpkins and honestly how hard could it be to make puree from them so I won't have to buy it. I thought I could find out how to do it online and it would be a breeze, I have never been so wrong before in my life. Online it said to slice it into quarters and bake them at 350 for one hour. I tried that and it ended up taking 2 hours for one half of my pumpkin to bake to the point of being able to remove the "meat". During those 2 hours the temp in my house continued to rise to a very unbearable heat. When it was finally done I then scraped the meat out and put it in my food processor then into freezer bags. As soon as I took the first half out of the oven I put the 2nd half in and it took another couple of hours, luckily I was able to go for a run while it was baking. On the 2nd pumpkin I decided to try a different method. I tried what we did last weekend when we made applesauce. I sliced the pumpkin and then cut the skin off and put them in a pot with a little water to steam. If anyone decides to puree their own pumpkin, THIS IS THE WAY TO DO IT. It was a bazillion times easier and like 2 years quicker. It didn't smell as good as the baking pumpkin did but who cares when it takes 40 min start to finish versus 4 hours. All in all I spent 6 1/2 hours doing pumpkins, but I do have 27 cups of puree to use that I won't have to pay for.
Now I want to try to make some cookies or pumpkin roll with it to see how it works compared to the canned stuff. I will just remind myself that it was free.
My other project this weekend was some cookies I made. I found this recipe online and wanted to try it but didn't have a reason to just make cookies. I like cookies but with just Ross and I its hard to eat a whole bunch of cookies, or sometimes its too easy to eat a whole bunch of cookies and we didn't need them in the house. (I usually end up giving baked goods to my neighbors when I am in a baking mood, however, these weren't something I wanted to take to my neighbors) My mom was doing a Halloween dinner while my grandma was down so I volunteered to make them and my sister and I got together on Saturday to try them. I think they turned out pretty good, I almost had a couple of my nephews convinced they were real witch fingers.
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