From Garden to Table

After six long months we finally harvested four extremely large pumpkins from the garden.  I was shocked by the size of them and wasn't really quite sure what we were going to do with them.  I had never baked with real pumpkin.  Normally I'm the girl who will make almost everything from scratch because hey it just tastes better that way, but to be honest, a whole pumpkin was just a bit intimidating.

One of the four that came out of the Garden.  Trust me they were all this huge!

I imagined a lot of cutting and boiling followed by even more straining and then finally pureeing, but after a little research I was surprised to find there's a much simpler way.  I carefully cut the pumpkin in half and set it on a baking pan.  (As we don't have the best stocked kitchen this was a grilling drip pan)  I added about a 1/4 inch of water to the bottom and baked it at 350 degrees for an hour and a half.  The pumpkin comes out literally falling off of the skin.  Its not soaked and is ready to be thrown in a blender!

From the blender it went into plastic baggies carefully labeled with the amount and the expiration date.  2 pumpkins and 16 cups later, I thought we might just have enough to tie us over.  (We ended up giving the other two away).

Now the question was what to make. Pumpkin bars, pumpkin bread, pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie....the choices seem endless.  Josh is a huge fan of pumpkin and I just love how it makes you think of fall.  With fall non-existent here in Kenya, I figured this would help a bit!  

Last night I decided to break into the stockpile and start creating some delicious treats.  First recipe, was this awesome pumpkin bread.  It isn't quite a bread as I had to substitute a cake pan for a bread pan.  This also caused the bread to sink a bit in a few places where the cheesecake topping collected.  All in all, its amazing.  Its super moist and has those great spiced flavors of pumpkin pie but in a different texture.  Josh compared it to a pumpkin cheesecake which works for me because that sounds just absolutely delicious.  Hmmm maybe that should be the next thing I make....

The delicious "bread" I made.  We couldn't wait to try it before taking a piicture.