Roasting Pumpkins

We roasted pumpkins! It was something that I'd been playing around with for a month or so (good things pumpkins don't rot quickly). I knew we were going home for Thanksgiving and with Patrick's good baking skills thought we could offer a homemade pumpkin pie. This finally gave me the motivation to get started on this cooking endeavor. We had two pie pumpkins from our CSA that we had been using as table decorations throughout the fall that were perfect candidates for the experiment. The plan was to roast the pumpkin, puree it, and then immediately freeze it. We would then bring a frozen bag home and use that to make the pumpkin pie.

I browsed the Internet a while before figuring out what we should do. And like all research on the Internet I learned that there were a bajillion ways to roast pumpkin and that all of them were the "right" way to do it. The constant things seem to be: deseed the pumpkin innards, roast with the peeling on (because it slides off after it's roasted), and after it's pureed make sure excess moisture is out by letting it drain in a sieve. Contradicting procedures included whether to roast it in halves or cut it up, roast it cut side up or down in the pan, and whether or not to include water in the pan. I chose to cut it up, roast it cut side up, and put a little water in the pan. My favorite source for this was from the Pioneer Woman blog. She's funny and very informative. For more details on roasting pumpkin see her post about making homemade pumpkin puree since this is basically what I decided to do.

Enjoy these prep pictures

These two little pumpkins produced about 2 1/2 cups of puree which we split into two quart size freeze bags. Pumpkin pie recipe is just around the corner!