How to make pumpkin puree

 

Photo credit: Tim Mossholder

While canned pumpkin is really delicious, it’s super easy to make homemade pumpkin puree to use in all your fantastic recipes.  Homemade puree freezes really well for year long stockpiling. Even though pumpkin pie, bread, doughnuts, pancakes, cookies, muffins…..dot our winter menus long after October, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas, the time to grab your pumpkins is now. Tourism pumpkin patches will till their pumpkins under the day after Halloween and it will be terribly hard to find one anywhere.  If you buy them now, stored properly, they will keep long into the winter.

Any pumpkins will work, but the tiny ones have the sweetest most pumpkiny flavor. And the gray pumpkins have the darkest flesh.  This one even had a sweet melon smell.  And it doesn’t have to be pumpkin, butternut squash is in the same family and makes an even thicker, rosier puree.

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Pumpkin Spice Mix

At the last minute, I decided to participate in the Write 31 Days blog challenge.  I participated two years ago and loved how it challenged me to post more often.

I took the year off last year, but am jumping back in this time with 31 Pumpkin Recipes :).  Some are recipes I’ve had in my rotation for a bit, and some are brand new being tested in my kitchen as we speak.   Some are savory, but most are sweet.

Before we can cook much with pumpkin, we need a good pumpkin spice recipe and I’m proud to offer you my own blend, which has gotten thumbs up all around from my recipe testers.

This recipe makes enough to fill a 2 1/2 oz spice jar, or you can quadruple it for a pint canning jar.  All spices are their ground versions.

4 Tbs Cinnamon

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