Pumpkin three ways

Pumpkin tower at College Run Farms in Surry

So I’ve spent most of the day today (10am to 3pm to be exact) cooking, roasting, toasting, baking and simmering three different preparations for pumpkin. A few weeks ago Jeremy and I went out to a local pumpkin farm (College Run Farm in Surry, VA) and I bought (along with about a half dozen cute tiny pumpkins and some very Martha Stewart-y white and green and speckled orange pumpkins) 3 “pie pumpkins” (or sugar pumpkins). I had never cooked with fresh pumpkin before but figured now was as good of a time as any to try it out.

Pumpkin field, College Run Farms, Surry Va

Seizing on the cooking mood I had been in this weekend I decided to tackle the pumpkin-cooking this morning. I knew I wanted to toast the seeds, I had done that last year with tasty results using the Toasted Pumpkin Seeds recipe from Simply Recipes, but I also wanted a bit of variety and Jeremy found some tasty variations on 101 Cookbooks.

Halved pumpkins

Now came the issue of what to do with all of the actual pumpkin, roasting was definitely the way to go so after halving each of the pumpkins, scooping out and separating the seeds and stringy bits I roasted the halves cut-side down in a 350 degree oven for an hour (checked them at 45 minutes and they weren’t quite tender enough). As the pumpkin halves cooled I flavored and toasted the pumpkin seeds (conveniently the oven was already hot), the results, although a pain to get off of the cookie sheets, were very tasty, especially the sweet and spicy (sugar and cayenne) ones, that’s a combination I will definitely add to the pumpkin-seed-flavoring repertoire.

Toasted pumpkin seeds three ways

Looking around at two of my mainstay recipe sites, 101 Cookbooks and Simply Recipes I found some very tasty sounding ideas for pumpkin bread and pumpkin soup with smoked paprika. You can check out the recipes on your own but the general idea for the bread was 6 cups of roasted pumpkin, lots of spices (fresh grated nutmeg and cinnamon and allspice) and a standard quickbread recipe, and the soup was 1 cup of pumpkin, chicken stock, onion, garlic, apple, cream and smoked paprika with a dash of cayenne.

I was rather pleased with myself that I had exactly 7 cups of pumpkin from the three sugar pumpkins, no extra at all (although I still have one small sugar pumpkin that didn’t get used, that may become another loaf of pumpkin bread later this month).

Pumpkin bread

Using the pumpkin was definitely easier than I thought it would be, the cleaning and seed separating was probably the hardest part. This was also the first time I had ever done a pureed soup, I have to admit, I was a bit intimidated by the whole thing, but again, simple to do and really sounds

Pumpkin soup

more complicated than it is…although the blender did get a bit obnoxious with me a few times, spitting up air bubble soup rockets (yes, I’m creating a new term) at me when I’d open the lid, but I blame the blender, and not the soup for that 😉 In the end both recipes came out great. I was a bit dubious that the soup wouldn’t be overpowered by the smoked paprika but once everything was blended together the apple and cream mellowed out the strong smoky flavor and I ended up with some very tasty (and surprising low-calorie, about 200 calories per serving) soup. The bread came out probably the best I have ever done bread-wise, it was moist but also had the lovely crunchy layer on top and very flavorful with all of the spices. So with all of this I now have breakfast and lunch for at least half of the week, excellent 🙂

btw, all photos documenting the pumpkin-ness are up in a set on my Flickr page.