pumpkin love. ♥

There are some days when I am on a mission; I want to do something and think about it all day long. Today, I woke up desiring to cut open the pumpkin that's been on our front porch since early October. Weird.

Work was interesting today. I am truly thankful that I love my job and couldn't imagine doing anything besides teaching... but it is frazzling and emotionally draining. ANYWAYS- The stress of today only added to my will to cut the pumpkin apart.

I came home a little earlier than usual this afternoon and got right to work. I wanted to roast some pumpkin seeds so I cut my little pumpky in half and separated the goo from the seeds.

Hungry yet? Yummy pumpkin guts.

Well... I rinsed the seeds and then mixed them with two tablespoons of butter and sea salt.  I then baked them at 300 degrees for 25 minutes. I burned my mouth being impatient.

Well... then I felt bad wasting the rest of the pumpkin. I "researched" (aka looked at other blogs) what to do with the flesh part of the pumpkin. Almost every one said to make pureed pumpkin for pies. I was conveniently on the phone with my Mama and she said that it wasn't very hard. Must be true if Mama says it ;)

So... I cut apart my little pumpky into chunks, put in a big, glass bowl, added a few inches of water, covered with plastic wrap, and then microwaved for 20 (yes, twenty) minutes. I then poked it with a fork to see if it was soft but I had to put it back for 5 more minutes.

After the microwaving, I drained the water out and the pumpkin flesh peeled right off of the skin. BE CAREFUL. I am seriously the most impatient person I have ever known and I burned myself multiple times trying to peel the skin off. Ridiculous. When will I learn?

After all of the peeling, I used our trusty immersion blender to puree it.

                                      before & after....


I put two cups of the puree in a freezer bag and added that to our ever-expanding (or so I think) freezer. The rest... well, you'll have to wait until tomorrow :)