Pumpkin Spice-Chocolate Chip Bar Cookies and how to modify recipes using home-cooked pumpkin

With clouds and rain returning this afternoon and Thanksgiving just around the corner, today seemed like a great day to bake an easy pumpkin treat. These are a soft cake-like bar cookie. What I love about cake-like cookies is they often have less sugar and butter. This recipe uses just 1/4 cup of butter and 2/3 cup of sugar. As a bonus, they have one whole cup of pumpkin puree, which means we all get a little bit more nutrition in our cookie. If the recipe below looks remotely familiar, that's because I modified the applesauce-raisin bar cookies I opted about last month to use pumpkin puree and chocolate chips (plus a wee bit more spice). Enjoy!

Pumpkin Spice-Chocolate Chip Bars

¼ cup butter or margarine, softened

⅔ cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 cup pumpkin puree (use slightly less by 1 tablespoon if using thick or canned pumpkin)

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1 ¼ to 1 ½ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice (or any combination of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg to equal the amount)

¾ cup chocolate chips (I use mini chips, but regular chocolate chips or chocolate chunks would also be good)

confectioners' sugar, about 1 tablespoon for dusting after baking

Preheat oven to 350 F (175 C). Grease a 9X13 inch baking pan. (I use a Pyrex one.)

In a medium bowl, cream butter and brown sugar. Beat in egg, then pumpkin puree. Stir in salt, spices, and baking soda. Stir in flour and chocolate chips.

Spread in the prepared baking pan. Bake for about 25 minutes, until done in the center and edges are golden.

Cool in the pan on a wire rack. Dust with the confectioners' sugar and cut into 24 squares.

(My husband 's comment,"these aren't going to last long." I think they're a hit.)

Home-cooked pumpkin puree and recipes that assume you're using canned pumpkin

This was a question from Kris in the comments the other day. I realize that many folks don't have time to follow the comments and then follow-up on answers to questions there. So, I thought I'd post about how to handle the often times, more watery consistency of home-cooked pumpkin compared to canned in baking recipes.

You have a couple of choices in how to compensate for the less thick home-cooked puree. 

1) Dump your puree into a mesh strainer set over a bowl and leave it to strain in the fridge overnight. 

2) Cook the puree down in a saucepan, stirring frequently, until of comparable thickness to canned pumpkin. 

3) Bake your puree in a metal baking pan in a 300 degree oven for about 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes, bringing puree from the sides into the center and vice versa.

4) Adjust the liquids or dry ingredients when baking. 

For recipes that include other liquids (such as pie, cakes, muffins), reduce the other liquid by 1 to 2 tablespoons, amount depending on how much liquid the recipe calls for. So, for pie I reduce the milk/cream by 2 tablespoons. With muffins, I often reduce by about 1 tablespoon. With pancakes, I reduce the liquid judging by the thickness of the batter. I can eyeball how thick a pancake batter needs to be.

With recipes that don't include other liquids, such as drop cookies, I add 1 extra tablespoon of flour to the cookie dough.

Decreasing the liquid or increasing the flour seems to work well for me, although I do strain off excess liquid after pureeing just before packing in freezer containers.

Can you use carving pumpkins for food?

This pumpkin -- 13.66 lbs, 33 cents/lb, total cost $4.51.

These pumpkins are referred to as "carving pumpkins," Jack-o'-lanterns, or field pumpkins. They're inexpensive in stores because they are easy to grow given the right conditions. They need space,  full sunlight, warm summers, and long growing seasons, all things my own yard lacks. Anyway, their variety tends to be stringier and more watery than those labeled "pie pumpkins." Despite that, for the price, they're a great food for use in recipes.

Cooking

This is the first of two carving pumpkins that I bought this year. On Monday, I used the skin-on, stove-top cooking technique for this one. 

I halved the pumpkin and scooped out the seeds, then cut the flesh with the skin of the pumpkin still on into 1-inch wides strips, omitting the stem and the blossom end. I used as much of the pumpkin as I could, including using the flesh just under the stem, and only cutting away a tiny amount of the pumpkin to remove the scar of the blossom end. I should back up just a tad. When I bought the pumpkin, I looked for one with minimal scarring on the skin. I generally trim away scars, as they don't puree as smoothly as the rest of the skin.

Okay, back to cooking the beast. I cooked the pumpkin in two large batches in a medium stockpot. I added about 1 cup of water to the pumpkin slices at the start of cooking, just to get things going. I brought the pot to a boil, reduced to a simmer, and covered, cooking until the skins were so soft I could cut them with the edge of a spoon, about 40 minutes. I stirred the pieces from time to time, when I thought about it. This wasn't a super hands-on job to perform.

Once well-cooked, I removed the lid from the pot and continued cooking for about 20 minutes longer to reduce the liquid. After that, I removed the pot from the heat and allowed the pumpkin to cool for an hour. 

At that point I pureed it in the food processor, straining it in a mesh strainer in batches. The strained out liquid was reserved in containers to use a soup stock and as liquid in smoothies or baking.

The final result was about 8 1/2 pints of pumpkin puree, 

1 1/2 quarts of pumpkin stock, 

and about 1 cup of seeds for roasting and snacking. Disregarding the value of the stock and the seeds, my pumpkin puree works out to be about 53 cents per pint, less than half the price of pumpkin puree in my grocery store. Admittedly, home-cooked pumpkin puree is more watery than commercially-cooked puree. So this isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison.  Still, if I could reduce the liquid content of my puree to that of store-bought, I believe home-cooked would be considerably less expensive than buying pumpkin puree.

We use pureed pumpkin in numerous ways, in smoothies, in baking and pancake/waffle making, in soups and sauces, and most recently, in quiche. I use the stock in soup and as liquid in smoothies. And of course, we enjoy the seeds roasted and salted. I find inexpensive carving pumpkins to be a great food source for tight budgets, full of vitamins, minerals, protein, complex carbs, and fiber.

I have one remaining large pumpkin to cook. That one is over 15 pounds. I expect it will yield about 9 pints of puree.