Harvest & Canning

I've been busy busy with some canning and freezing. It's just me and my hubby but I enjoy canning and it'll be such a treat opening a fresh jar of salsa or jam in the middle of winter.

I made up about 4 batches of salsa so far and have been debating on making up some more, it's a lot of work but it's so good and with Christmas gifts I'm afraid we'll run out even before 2010. We'll see though I have a ton of apples to take care of right now.

Just this last weekend I picked up 3 pie pumpkins and I had what I thought was 2 other pumpkins the weekend before. I found out those 2 are ambercup squash, well I'm going to treat them as pumpkins and see how that works :) I spent all afternoon yesterday pureeing the 3 pumpkins and one of the squash. This was super easy to do and for $4.00 I got a ton of pureed pumpkin to use. I think I ended up with 18 1/2 cups total! I think I could supply my whole family with pumpkin for our famous choc. chip pumpkin muffins.

I am horrible at printing off recipes that I have found online so maybe I'll just note a couple recipes on my blog so I know where I can find them come next year :)

First the instructions for pureeing the pumpkins (I should've taken pics but I followed the same instructions over at Pioneer Woman)

First I snapped the stem off then cut the pumpkin in half. This was not an easy task and I was sure I was going to be heading to the ER with a my finger cut off or something. I ended up using my Ulu knife that we got in AK and it worked much better. Next scrape out the seeds, no need to get real picky with all the string stuff.

Heat oven to 350, place the pumpkins on a baking sheet (I put mine in cut side up) and bake for about 45 mins. or until tender when poked with a fork.

Let the pumpkins cool a bit and scrape the peeling off, cut into chunks and throw into the food processor and puree. Water might need to be added if they're too dry.

After pureeing I used my Pampered Chef measuring cup (the one that works awesome for p.b.) and measured out 1 cup at a time then put it into quart size freezer bags, squeezed the air out and stacked them into freezer.

All of this really took me longer than I thought, I'd say about 4 hrs. But I really think I'll be happy I've got all that pumpkin ready to use. I was anxious to see how good this pumpkin would be so I made up a batch of my choc chip pumpkin muffins right away. I thought they turned out pretty good, they seemed to be a bit sweeter so I think I could cut the sugar down on my recipe a bit next time.

Maybe if I remember I'll snap a pic of all the pumpkin stacked up in the freezer to share.