Sunday was spent primarily in the kitchen. I’d picked up pie pumpkins in October, but what with getting sick, I had not yet gotten around to converting my squash into puree for pie.

Yes, that’s right. Five pumpkins. We really like pumpkin pie around here.

Michael cut the tops off the pumpkins.

I scooped out the innards.

Lids were then put back on top, and baked in a 250 oven for about two hours.

Pumpkins are done when you can stick a form in ’em.

Now the pumpkins have to be peeled. The problem here, is that when the pumpkin is hot, the skin literally peels off with a slight tug. However, as mentioned previously, the pumpkin is HOT. I tend to let it cool a little, and then slice off the skin off with a knife.

It is recommended, though not required, that you keep waterproof bandages around. Actually, most people won’t need bandages. Unfortunately I have an extremely bad habit of sitting my knife down blade up.

This is a very stupid thing to do, and why we really should just purchase stock companies that make waterproof bandages.

Chunks of pumpkin are put in the food processor and pureed. This can take quite awhile, as the cooler the pumpkin, the harder it is to puree.

I ended up putting ice packs on my food processor between batches, because it was running really hot.

The puree is dumped into a big pot, and then heated, stirring regularly to keep it from boiling. This is the volume of puree that I got from five pie pumpkins, as well as the volume of skin to go onto the compost pile.

Once I decided the puree was hot enough that any bacteria were DEAD, I decanted the puree into freezer bags, in two cup portions. As you can see, I got 12 cups of puree from my five pumpkins. Not too bad.

These bags were then put into an ice bath so they could cool down quickly. You always want to cool things foods down rapidly before placing them in the refrigerator or freezer. This retards or stops bacterial growth, which is what you want. You want your food to be cool before you place it into the fridge or freezer, so you do not increase the temperature of your fridge, and the other foods in it.