Pumpkin Purée

I bought a half-bushel of winter squash at the local farm stand before they closed for the winter.  A

half bushel of squash is a lot of squash - by the way.  It it was only $15- an irresistible bargain. And good gosh, is it healthy for you.  I did promise when I bought the squash that I would share with you how we used it all up.   

Over the weekend, I made pumpkin puree.  Puree is the basis for a lot of pumpkin dishes.  When you buy a can of pumpkin from the store, you are buying pumpkin puree.  But the stuff fresh off the vine (technically, off of the vine and sitting in a cool spot in the house) tastes even better.  Especially when the pumpkins you are using are little heirloom varieties!  My half bushel of squash included 4 little pumpkins.  (Some people call these sugar pumpkins.  They're smaller than the pumpkins you use for Jack-O-Lanterns.)   We gave the outsides of the pumpkin a quick rinse in order to get rid of any dust that may have accumulated on them since we brought them home.  I pre-heated the oven to 350*, and covered a jelly roll pan in olive oil. 

Here is how we made our pumpkin puree:

1) Sliced the pumpkins up into smaller chunks.  I tried to leave them in halves, but they weren't snugging up next to each other in the pan as well as I would have liked.  So, I sliced them down a little more.  After slicing them down, remove the seeds and the stringy parts around the seeds.

2) Place the pumpkins, cut side down but with the skins still on, onto the pan.  I probably should have used 2 pans, but since I really didn't want to clean 2 pans, and I wanted the pumpkins to steam as much as possible, I just kept snugging them together as tightly as I could.  Eventually, I had to layer a few extra pieces on the top.  (I really didn't want to wash another pan!)

3) Bake the pumpkin in a 350* oven for an hour.  When the orange middle part is soft enough to pierce with a fork, you are finished.  Pull the pumpkin out and let it cool for a while.  Remove the skins from the pumpkin "meat" - either by pulling it off with your hands, or using a knife to cut the rind off.  Put all of the pumpkin into a large bowl.

Now, you can puree your pumpkin in a blender.  In a food processor.  In a food mill.   With a hand or stand mixer, or with a potato masher.  I really wasn't in the mood to clean a lot of extra dishes, so I opted to smash my pumpkin down with the potato masher.  Since the pumpkin was already so soft, mashing it down took me just a couple of minutes.  It took me longer to pull the rinds off of the baked pumpkins than it did for me to mash these guys up.

4) Once the pumpkin is all mashed and smooth, let it cool and then transfer it into containers for freezer storage.  I put one cup of pumpkin into each bag, because almost every recipe I have seen for pumpkin stuff calls for 1 cup of pumpkin.  Seal the pumpkin bags, and lay flat for freezing. 

5) I laid my pumpkin puree on a cookie sheet to keep it flat, and then put it in the freezer.  I left two cups of pumpkin out.  I put them in glass jars in the fridge, to use today and tomorrow.

From the 4 little pumpkins, I ended up with 8 generous cups of pumpkin puree.

The first of the two jars of reserved pumpkin will be used to make GF Pumpkin Muffins, which I'll freeze for my breakfasts this week.

The second jar is going into Pumpkin Enchiladas.  I had some fantastic Pumpkin Enchiladas at a restaurant last month, and this recipe looks very similar to what I had there.