Thursday, September 23, 2010

Pumpkin

This past spring JJ came home with a pumpkin planted in a paper cup.  (Project with the Daisy Girl Scout troop where she is a junior leader.)  It sprouted and got planted in the potager among the trees.  We ignored it.  It thrived, rambling all over the garden and eventually producing two pumpkins.  The kids were thrilled.  But as they matured they turned out to be cooking pumpkins not carving pumpkins.  Dissapointing, but that's life sometimes.

So we harvested the pumpkins. 

Chopped them into bits. 



 Cooked them.


And bottled them. 


Two pumpkins produced 18 quarts of pumpkin puree which we will use this winter to make pie, soup, bread, cookies, and maybe even fudge.

4 comments:

Sunita Mohan said...

There's nothing more exciting for little kids than to have the plants they grew bear fruit. And this looks like it bore a whole lot of fruit!

Wendy said...

Do you pressure can your pumpkin or freeze it? I ask, because I hear that it shouldn't be canned (although one can buy it canned in the store, and so I wonder ;), but if you can it, I would be interested in hearing how you do it so that I can copy you ;).

Alan said...

Wendy

We pressure canned our pumpkin. 10lbs of pressure for 90 minutes, hot packed. Our canner directions said to cube it and top the jars with hot liquid. We cooked the pumpkin, pureed it, and filled the jars with hot puree (we use it mostly in soup, bread, cookies, etc. so chunks were not needed.) We LOVE our pressure canner. It lets us store a lot of things we would have to freeze otherwise. Freezer space is at a premium here, and it is very susceptable to loss from power outages. How do you preserve your harvest?

Wendy said...

Thank you for the info. Usually, I leave the pumpkin raw, and cook as needed, but having it already cooked saves so much time when what I am planning to do is to make soup or bread. It's such a drag to have to cook the pumpkin BEFORE I can start to make something with it.

I have cooked and then frozen the pumpkin, but then, I have to thaw it before I can use, and as you mentioned, freezer space is at a premium. Right now, I'm not fitting anything else in my freezer - and I may not be able to get anything out ... without a pry bar ;).

I pressure can other things - corn, chicken, beans, potatoes - but I've never pressured canned pumpkin. Thank you, again, for the details. I will try it this year ;).

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