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| I strained the pumpkin in a mesh sieve, saving the liquid for a pot of soup |
In case you couldn't have guessed, the pie in yesterday's post was a pumpkin pie, using pumpkin that I cooked on Saturday.
Saturday was a cold and gray day. Nothing better than spending a few hours baking to warm things up. And as it IS the end of October, cooking up one of my Jack o'lantern pumpkins seemed most appropriate.
After last week's post on pumpkin pie frugal hacks, I decided to actually keep track of what 1 Jack o'lantern yields after cooking.
I used an 11 pound Jack o'lantern (if you remember, I paid 19 cents a pound, so $2.09 for the pumpkin).
I baked the pumpkin, stem included, cut in half, seeds scooped out, for about 2 hours at 300 degrees.
I scooped the flesh out with a spoon and ran it through the food processor. With each batch, I then put it in a mesh strainer over a cup, to strain excess liquid. I strained for about 10 minutes per batch.
My yields from one pumpkin:
10 cups of strained puree
3 cups of strained liquid, which I added to a pot of pumpkin soup that evening
2 cups of seeds for roasting
I could have strained the puree longer, and achieved a consistency similar to canned pumpkin. That likely would have reduced my yields to about 8 cups.
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| pumpkin soup for 4, using 2 cups of puree and all of the straining liquid, plus a container of frozen ham stock |
For the 10 cups of puree, my cost, then is about 41 cents per pound. Had I strained it further, my cost would have been about 52 cents per pound. If I count in the cost of the oven, it would add about 30 cents total. So my cost of pumpkin puree ranges from 48 cents per pound, to 60 cents per pound. And the seeds and soup liquid were a bonus, as was the heated kitchen.
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| about 2 cups of seeds for roasting and snacking in the afternoon |
Not too bad!
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| and even this wasn't "wasted". The hungry compost heap "ate" it all. |
And this is all that was left over.
