Fresh cooked Pumpkin!

Today was a "cooking" day. I spent most of the day cooking. I like to cook up some "extra" meals and freeze them up for those "quick" meals that are needed. After I finished with all of that, I decided to cook up the extra pumpkins I had "laying " around. I cut them in half, and then Simone cleaned them out. After they were all clean, then i place the halves into a large roasting pan with some water in the bottom and placed that into the oven on 350 degrees for about 1 1/2 hours. We then took it out and let it cool so that we could work with it. We placed into re-usable freezer containers and zip lock bags that all went into the freezer. This will make some good eatin' later...pumpkin muffins, pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin bars, and of course, pumpkin pies.

I do have one nice pumpkin left and we will be using that for part of our Thanksgiving meal. I will take in, cut off the top (much like when you carve a pumpkin), clean it out, then fill it with sausage stuffing and bake it for about 1 hour in a 350 degree oven. This will be great, I will serve the stuffing right in the pumpkin container and when we scoop the stuffing out, we will get the soften, cooked pumpkin in each scoop. I took this idea from a friend of mine, who gave me a recipe for beef stew that you do the same way...and serve the stew in the pumpkin and scrap the pumpkin out. It sounds so lovely and I thought the pumpkin would be great with homemade sage and cornbread stuffing.

Well, it looks like all our prepared pumpkin is up and ready for use in our baked good. The only real problem now, is what to bake with it first.