Pumpkin Smoothies, Ice Cream, and Pie

A week ago, just after Halloween was over, I decided to use all the pumpkins we somehow had all over our house. I'd only bought 1, and it was an organic one just a little bigger than a basketball that I'd gotten at the Good Earth Food Co-op for $2.99. The boys had gotten one from a nearby community garden at some point, and it was little... A little bigger than a softball. Then they had gotten two free balloon-sized ones to paint from Sam's Club because their Gramma brought them on the right day when they were giving them out for free. Lastly, we had several HUGE ones put out in our yard at some point, probably by our land lord. (Like could almost win a prize at the county fair huge.)

I cut up and baked the small one, but it burned and was thrown out. The seeds from it - which we had had the longest - looked like they had germinated and were ready to sprout and they baked up oh so crisp and tasty :-)  One of the two medium-small ones had started to rot and so it was thrown out too.

From just the ONE medium-small pumpkin that remained, I managed to bake a small portion and the rest was steamed. The steamed pumpkin equaled approximately 4-6 cups. (The baked part that I ate like mashed potatoes was probably almost another 2 cups worth!)

I didn't even touch the basketball-sized organic one!

I decided to make pie using this recipe:

2 cups pumpkin
3 eggs
1/2 cup sucanat
generous dash or two of RealSalt
1TBSP pumpkin pie spice
1cup cream

I put the eggs and sucanat in the blender and creamed them together until pretty well blended. Then I added the salt and spice and blended again. Next was the cream and a light blend. Finally, I added the pumpkin and blended again until it was all together.

I ended up with about 5 or 6 cups of mix and poured a little more than half in a glass 6x9 rectangular baking dish to make crustless pie. Or maybe they were more like bars, lol! Honestly, if I was going to make bars, I would have taken it out of the oven when it was done baking - about 30 minutes at 350 degrees - let them cool a bit, completely flipped the whole thing over and baked it again for a while before cutting them up because you know how the bottom of the pie is always kind of mushy? Well the bottom of this comes out mushy, lol!

The rest of the mix I poured into two small glasses and told my boys that it was a smoothie. They LOVED it and BEGGED me for more! Still having quite a bit of pumpkin, I decided to make more. I WAS going to make more pie, but it was such a tasty smoothie that I thought to myself:

Hmm... I bet this would make some DELICIOUS ice cream!

So, the entire second batch went into my ice cream maker et voila! Pumpkin Pie flavored Ice Cream :-D Oh Man! This stuff was SO GOOD! My hubby noisily enjoyed it while over the phone with his friend, and his friend demanded that I save some for him, lol.

Fast forward to today. A couple of days ago, I'd cut up and steamed 3/4ths of my basketball-sized pumpkin - baking and eating the other 1/4 like mashed potatoes. I let the entire thing cool and set it in the fridge. Today, I took two cups out of the at LEAST 8 cups of pumpkin chunks - probably closer to 10 or even 12 - and made this recipe once more. This time, I divided the whole recipe up into cups. We all drank pumpkin smoothies, and I plan to make another batch and turn it into ice cream, mmm mmm mmm!

The rest of the pumpkin is going into the freezer! I'll definitely have enough to make pies for Thanksgiving, lol!

And tomorrow, hubby says we are going to cut up and do whatever we can with the one HUGE pumpkin we saved from the squirrels, oi! There were several in our yard, but the squirrels dug into most of them and stole the seeds, and the pumpkins turned to mush. We looked and saw that just one only had a few small bite marks and scratches, so we brought it inside. I can't WAIT to get my hands on those seeds!!!

Enjoy and have a happy day :-D

This blog post is part of Traditional Tuesdays blog carnival :-)