Heirloom Pumpkin Pies

Since I took on baking them myself, all of my holiday pies have come directly from the pumpkin. Over time they became my expected contribution to the feast.   Back in the food dark ages, I used ordinary jack-o-lantern pumpkins. Although the pulp was on the watery side, it was still an improvement over that nasty looking stuff in the cans.  I graduated to Sugar Pie pumpkins when they became readily available, and in recent years have grown my own.  This year’s crop of exotically named Galeux D Eysines heirlooms was surely the best ever.  The name romantically translates to “embroidered with pebbles from Eysines.”   A luscious rosy salmon color with oddly warty bumps, they were almost too gorgeous to bake, but bake them I did.  The largest topped out at 16 inches in diameter packed with about 25 pounds of solid orange flesh. 

wedged into the oven

In prior years I’ve cut my pumpkins in half, scooped out the seeds and baked face down on a cookie sheet, but this behemoth stymied that plan.  Cutting through that monster would have taken a chain saw.  Always looking for the simple solution, I decided just to pop (well maybe wedge..) the whole thing into the oven with the temperature set at 350.  After 3 hours, it was so tender I could pierce it through with a bamboo skewer.  Drooping over the cookie sheet a bit did make it a little tricky to extricate from the oven, (can you hear my husband laughing in the background?) but once  on the counter, scooping out the lovely orange flesh and separating the seeds was a breeze. 

After this successful experiment, I swore off wrestling with a knife and unbaked pumpkin ever again.  Out of the food processor flowed a silken orange puree that set my mouth watering in anticipation of pies to come and tonight I grabbed a quart from the fridge to make a Pumpkin Curry soup that tasted of fall in the garden.  Now that’s what Thanksgiving is all about.

Terry