Pumpkin Mania

Today we turned this
into this


The spirit pumpkins that I grew from seed needed to be processed. It was a lot of fun and satisfying work.

Violet and her little friend Sam helped me scoop out the insides.


I then chopped them into chunks, steamed them...




...and pureed them in the food processor. I added the puree back to the pot and cooked it down a bit.




Then I packaged them into ziplock bags and put them in the freezer.

I see a pumpkin pie or Mama's pumpkin bread in the immediate future, but in the meantime, we made this:





I made a thick sauce using tomatoes, beans, rosemary, oregano and sage from the garden. I also added ground venison from a deer Kalin harvested and some of the juice from the pumpkin puree. Then I stuffed it into half of a pumpkin and baked it at 350 for ever (it just seemed like that , it took 2 hours for the pumpkin shell to be tender enough to eat). I served it with locally grown basmati rice and sesame french bread. I forgot to take a picture of it in its whole state. It took so long to bake that we cut it as soon as it came out of the oven, as everyone was starving by that point. It was a most delicious meal. Violet had fun snapping the purple bush beans and making her contribution, brownies, for the meal.


While I was making dinner Violet and Sam practised their writing their "p"s and drew pictures of pumpkins growing on the vine. Violet asked me to show her how to spell the word pumpkin. I thought that she did a really good job with it.






All in all it was a wonderful day. It felt good to really slow down a bit and do some homey things. It was also a reminder that fall is approaching. Wahoo!!!!