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[kupukello]

What to do with a 2.5 kg pumpkin?One of Bramble's home-grown pumpkins (moved to granny's yard after window-sill growing at home) has produced a decent sized pumpkin that now waits to become... WHAT? I've found recipes for pumpkin pies (are they any good?), and a recipe for pumpkin bread (that looks more like a sweet bun than anything else), even a

Comments

[solith_]

SOUP! :D

[kupukello]

Soup? Pumpkin and what else? Cream?

[solith_]

There are different recipes you could use. Only pumpkin with sour cream, or pumpkin and a bit of tomato. There are plenty of recipes on the Internet, try something. I assure you, it's really tasty soup :)

[naadi]

Ooooh, pumpkin pie is my absolute favorite! I make it at least twice a year for our Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday dinners. I don't usually make it from actual pumpkins though, lol. I get the kind already pureed and canned. ;-) But I'd be glad to share my no sugar recipe if you're interested. ^.^

And yay for Bramble growing pumpkins! :D Do you do jack-o-lanterns there? After you scoop all the insides, you can carve it.

[naadi]

Mmmmmm - pumpkin bread and pumpkin seeds! I love those too! Hee! How could I forget! :DD

We did jack-o-lanterns every year when my daughter was growing up. Awesome fun - messy - lol - but fun!

[kupukello]

It's starting to look as if I have to puree the pumpkin and then try all of a pie, bread and toast the seeds too. And then of course try to carve the pumpkin :) My upbringing (the hard times are not THAT far away...) simply denies me to just CARVE the pumpkin without using the stuff inside for something as well (as long as it's NOT pumpkin-lingonberry relish, GOSH!!! :D)

Jack-o-lanterns are familiar to us only from American tv shows and store decorations, actually. Finns have started "celebrating" Halloween only a few years back, before that it was just one of the strange things Americans seemed to get up to, hih! But this year, yep, we are going to carve a pumpkin (which will definitely be rotten by Halloween :P)

[florahart]

Yes, Pie; also soup; also, depending on how big it is, you can hollow it out and then stuff it with bread, other kinds of seeds, sharp cheese, a little meat, and cream, set the top back on, and bake the whole thing so when it's done and you slice it you get a slice of cooked gourd and a chunk of variable stuffing to eat with it. Omnomnom. (I could find a recipe if that sounds remotely good to you)

But mmmmmmpumpkin piiiiiiie. Yes, any good.

[kupukello]

Wow!! A pumpkin full of all that?! I'd definitely be interested in a recipe although I think THIS particular pumpkin will get puréed and then used for pie, bread and toasted seeds as well :) The pumpkin growing was fun though, the flowers were BEAUTIFUL and the beach ball growing in granny's yard was also fun to watch, so maybe next year Bramble will grow some more!

I've never tasted a pumpkin pie, so that too will be interesting. (Which makes me wonder why Finns haven't grown pumpkins as they clearly DO grow here! At least here in the south).

[sevenpapermen]

Pumpkin ravioli. Sooooo good!

After you boil the pumpkin, skin and all, the skin just falls off, much like a broiled/boiled tomato. And you can freeze the pumpkin if you don't use all of it in the first round of recipes.

My favorite, can't-go-wrong recipe using pumpkin is pumpkin pie. MMMMMmmmmmmMMmm!!!

[sevenpapermen]

Ooh! I forgot about the pumpkin seeds! Love those too! Good and salty! Pumpkin bread is amazing. I don't care for banana nut bread but no pumpkin bread is safe in my house!

[kupukello]

Boiling the pumpkin? Is the result the same as in baking it? Apparently pumpkin isn't used "as is" for much of anything but you first have to cook it in some way? (I'm still baffled about the lack of Finnish pumpkin recipes and knowledge, as clearly it DOES grow here too!)

Have you got any pointers to a good pumpkin pie recipe? The kind that wouldn't use but "basic" ingredients? With "basic" I mean flour, sugar and such, not some cake mix or specific type of cheese that would be difficult to get our hands on here.

[amelia_eve]

Yes, pumpkin bread is sweet. It's a quick bread that uses the pumpkin to keep it moist. Like most USerican treatments of pumpkin, the seasonings tend toward cinnamon, nutmeg, and brown sugar. Pumpkin pie is a custard pie that includes pumpkin puree as part of the liquid, along with the canonical cinnamon and nutmeg spices. If you do this, be sure to bake the pumpkin rather than boiling it -- boiling will leave it too wet

[kupukello]

Oh! Thank you very much, this is VERY helpful! Especially the tip about HOW to eat the seeds as I'm sure we'd just, you know, eaten them whole :D

Our oven might even be big enough to fit two halves of the pumpkin as it's not THAT big after all (although big enough to make Bramble and me grin, we are SUCH gardeners, aren't we :D)

[amelia_eve]

You can use it just like you would any other yellow squash, really. One thing to keep in mind when you are dealing with US-based pumpkin instructions is that pumpkins here are mostly grown for use as jack-o-lanterns. That means they are mostly hollow, with a thin shell of flesh and an open interior with lots of seeds. My experience with Euro-pumpkins is that they are actually grown for eating, and are therefore much more solid and meaty, with only a small seed cavity inside.

Here's a really comprehensive page on how to go from a pumpkin to a pie, including metric measures and substitutions. Note that in the US, evaporated milk is also called condensed milk, but it is not the same thing as sweetened condensed milk, which is what you see more in Europe and Latin America. Evaporated milk has a similar consistency to ordinary milk (liquid, not gooey) and a slightly "cooked" taste on its own. It has been boiled down from fresh milk to reduce its volume by half, so it is more concentrated. You could mess around boiling it, or you could

[kupukello]

I've once used AMERICAN condensed milk for something but it was quite hard to find any here. I had no idea you had even more of the odd stuff, and that they are all not the same! Thanks for the warning!

The site is VERY good, thank you for the link! The metric measurements are nice, the author has made a small error though. Euro and US tea spoons are the same size and I can't quite think what kind of equipment you'd need to measure 1.25 grams :D ½ tea spoons of vanilla extract is a bit less than 20 grams of the stuff, LOL!

What do you think, how much different is the result if you STEAM the pumpkin compared to baking it in the oven? We have large double pot steamer, so that sounds like an easier way than stuffing the halves to oven and then poking them at intervals? Our microwave oven is way too small to do it all in one go, though.