On Sunday we decided to carve pumpkins with the kids because we’re clinically insane. Pumpkin carving is supposed to be a great family activity, right? Well it appears that our kids are already too cool to do the family thing. Because after five minutes of feigning interest in pumpkins that weighed more than the two of them, they left me and the hubby to the messy work of cleaning out the mucky insides of the pumpkins while they ran off to play. That is despite the hubby’s very best efforts to entertain them and keep them engaged…

He’s special, isn’t he?

Then I decided to morph into Martha-freakin’-Stewart and try, for the first time ever, to actually use the pumpkin flesh.  How hard could it be, right?

I’m here to tell you: HARD. 

Sweet Baby Jesus, I had no idea it would be a WHOLE DAY PUMPKIN EXTRAVAGANZA. I scraped, I chopped, I sorted, I cooked (and cooked and cooked), I mashed, I blended, I mixed. And then I made pie dough. Anyone who says pie dough is SO HARD to make has never spent a whole afternoon fiddling with messy pumpkin guts. Pie dough is so easy, people! It has like 5 ingredients and it always turns out. Where as pumpkin pie filling….not so much.

I used a recipe from an old Mennonite cookbook created my the community where my mother grew up. There are awesome recipes in there. Perhaps this was just not one of them? But I figured with this being a recipe from a woman who would probably have died rather than use “store-bought” pumpkin pie filling, it would be an authentic pumpkin recipe. However using real pumpkin made the filling too wet and runny and the result was that I cooked those little bastards for a full TWO HOURS before they were finally totally cooked through! In ten minute increments. Because I didn’t know how long it was going to take and I was NOT going to burn the damn pie crust! And then, thinking I would fix the problem with the third pie, I added about 84 cups of flour and cornstarch to the pie filling, hoping to thicken it up and make it cook faster. BIG FAIL. It cooked somewhat faster but the pie tasted like beige. Literally, it tasted like bland.  So the final pie was a wash. But at least the first two tasted all right. It was 11:00pm before I finished the whole ordeal. 

Oh and I also cleaned and roasted the pumpkin seeds because I like roasted pumpkin seeds and since I’m already making a mess, what’s a little MORE mess? Because nothing says Marthat Stewart like a kitchen that looks like a pack of feral monkeys with a food processor destroyed an entire pumpkin patch all over it!

Now I understand why some people sneak around at night and smash other people’s pumpkins. I am now convinced that it is not teenage vandals, but men and women driven to the hysteria after a bad culinary encounter with pumpkins, who loseWeight Exercise it and lash out at the unsuspecting vegetables.