everett (11/05/82)
#N:hp-pcd:3500001:000:1817
hp-pcd!everett Nov 5 08:16:00 1982
re: REAL pumpkin pies
for the last several years we've grown pumpkins in our garden and made
pies from them. My wife does the actual cooking of the pie, but I think
she uses just a regular pumpkin pie recipe, replacing the canned pumpkin
with 2 cups of our pumpkin. One of the tricks, though, is that to keep
the pie from seperating (and getting watery), you need to mix the
ingredients semi-slowly with a hand mixer so as not to get a lot of froth
in the mixture. If you don't do this, the eggs with seperate out from
the rest of it and you'll have something not even useful in a pie-fight.
As for the stringy-ness (nice word!) of the pumpkin, that can be avoided
in the rendering. What you do, is this:
cut the pumpkin in half and clean out the seed and gunk from inside
cut the halves up into smaller pieces 1 to 2 inches square
put the pieces into a pot and cover with water
boil for 20 to 30 minutes or until tender ( the outer skin will start
seperating easily from the 'meat')
drain off the water, then run the pumkin through an applesauce colander
(you know, the funnel shaped aluminum thing riddled with holes
with a wooden pestle that you roll around and around until all the
goodies are squished through into another pan under the colander
leaving the strings and rinds and other ugly gunk (that's a great
word) inside the colander where it can be scraped out and thrown
back on the garden.)
at this point, you have high quality pumkin pie material (provided you
started with high quality pumpkins)
(you know, I think I must have a thing about parenthesis!)
Happy Thanksgiving
Everett Kaser
hp-pcd