If you’ve been following our blog since the summer, you’ll know that we grew a lot of pumpkins this year. Or at least we tried to. Some of them didn’t take off, but we eventually had success with seeds we bought and planted in July. You’ll also know that one of my goals with the garden was to make food entirely out of the garden. This Thanksgiving, we’ve been able to accomplish that by roasting pumpkins we harvested in September, puréeing the flesh, and making a pie. Here’s a brief walkthrough of the pumpkins we used, the roasting and puréeing process, and the final product, with pictures of each step.

The Pumpkins

The pumpkins we used were New England Sugar Pies. We bought the seeds from Baker Creek. This variety dates back to the 1860s and is the perfect pumpkin for pie. Baker Creek describes it in the following way: “The noted small sugar pumpkin of New England. The orange fruit weighs 4 to 5 lbs and has fine, sweet flesh superb for pies.” That description is spot-on. Without any added sweetness, the roasted flesh was delightful. It was the perfect pumpkin to use. It was easy to grow, and we’ll certainly grow more of this variety.

Roasting & Puréeing

I had never roasted a pumpkin prior to this week, but I approached it similar to how I’ve roasted spaghetti squash. I split each pumpkin in half and scooped out the seeds. I think we could have washed, dried, and roasted the seeds to eat, but I wasn’t interested in that much work this time. With the seeds out, I brushed some oil on the flesh, pierced the skin in a few places to aid in the roasting process and put them in a 400-degree oven for an hour or so. Our house smelled so good during this time.

To purée them, I let them cool entirely and used a spoon to scoop out the flesh, which was much easier than I anticipated. The flesh then went into our small food processor and was blended until smooth, with water being added as needed. A note for future me: Buy a larger food processor. It took some time, since it had to be done in batches, but it was an easy process in general. In the end, we had more than a quart of pumpkin purée, which was much more than we needed for the pie, so Magz made a pumpkin soup with the excess. It was delicious.

Making a Pie

I love making pies. My grandma is an excellent pie maker, so I think I came by it naturally. I also always make a homemade crust. A few years ago, I found a great pumpkin pie recipe that uses almond milk in place of dairy since Magz can’t have dairy. If you weren’t told it was made with almond milk, you’d never know. I used that recipe again this year, and there was no noticeable difference between the homemade purée and canned pumpkin when it came to mixing and baking other than it needed to cook a bit longer due to additional moisture. The end product was great. Please ignore the divot. That was the result of foil touching it when I was trying to prevent the crust from burning. It was absolutely delicious.