It began at the Bistro

Greetings All!
I have once again taken over my wife's blog to tell another story.

Back in the middle of August, Lana posted a blog telling about the harvesting of the pumpkin. Well, a few nights ago, we "canned" it. Now, usually, when we want to make pumpkin bread, or pumpkin this, or pumpkin that - we go buy a can of pumpkin. Boring, easy, and good enough.

Well, now that we had this awesome pumpkin, we decided to try to can it ourselves. In short, it worked beautifully! But the story is in the details - why else would you be reading this?

The first chore was simply cutting the thing in half. We didn't have any knives big enough. So, we did our best with the heavy kitchen knife we have here. Now, the Kiser women have this tendency to injure themselves when cutting stuff - so I handled the knife. No injury - except now the pumpkin was cut in half.

We placed the two halves - face-down - on one of Lana's industrial sized aluminum cookie sheets. Covered it with foil, and baked it for a good long while. It filled the kitchen with this wonderful smelling pumpkin-ness! Soon enough, the insides were mostly cooked, soft, gooey, and ready for canning.

Lana did most of the scraping to get the meat out of the pumpkin. She did an excellent job - when she was done, there was only a thin shell of pumpkin skin left - the rest went into the blender for a ride.

We split the pumpkin goo into bags, labeled them, and froze them flat. In one of Lana's earlier posts, she mentioned that I labeled something 2007. Oops - my fault. It was easy enough to change that 7 into a 9. These "canned" pumpkins are now waiting for a cold day and some fresh potato soup to make pumpkin bread. That will be one tasty dinner!

Until next time,
-M