Manly Men Like Pumpkin Butter… even though it sounds like something little Mary would serve at her make believe tea party…

The time of year is upon us for some pretty cool seasonal food. I grew a few things this summer, and it always kind of sucks to have to wait for the fall stuff until… well… fall. I did well with buttercup squash and pumpkins. I only planted one pumpkin plant, and it only grew 4 pumpkins, but I think I’m set on pumpkin for awhile…

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Now, I like pumpkin pie as much as the next dude.  Three of the four pumpkins we grew are in the picture above.  The two that are a darker orange color weigh over 100# each.  The lighter-orange pumpkin weighs slightly over 80#, and one more pumpkin not pictured weighed in at over 40#.  That’s over 320# of pumpkin… how much pie can a fellow eat?!?  Although one or two of these may end up wasted as jack-o-lanterns, this is way too much food to not find some different ways to eat pumpkin.  Deciding to try out the smallest (40#!) pumpkin first, I decided on a pumpkin soup and some pumpkin butter.  The pumpkin soup was okay, but the butter rocked, so I thought I would share my recipe and experience.

The first thing we did was to split the pumpkin, gut it, and bake it.

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I cut a bit of it off raw to make the pumpkin soup, but the rest of it went in the over at 350° for about an hour.  Remember, this was a BIG pumpkin… I had to do 2 shifts to cook the entire thing.  I made the pumpkin soup while the pumpkin baked 🙂

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Once it was nice and soft, I removed it carefully from the oven and drained of the juices (there were a ton of juice cooked out of this sucker).  Then, I got out a knife to start removing the flesh from the shell.  Of course, being a dude, I like my knives big and sharp.

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The big knife was, of course, a mistake.  Almost every time I get together with a knife in the kitchen, someone gets cut.  And seeing as how no one will enter the kitchen if I am holding a knife, it’s always me.

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So, with my finger hurting, I soldier on and remove the pumpkin flesh.  It all goes into a bowl and I mash it up.  Now, as you can imagine, I got me a ton of pumpkin meat… way more than I’m going to need to make a little bit of pumpkin butter.  The nice thing about pumpkin is it freezes really well.  So, I decide I’m going to make about 8 cups of pumpkin puree into pumpkin butter, so I blended and set aside 8 cups.

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I freeze the rest of the flesh just mashed.

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I froze it mashed instead of pureed in case I came across a recipe where the pumpkin needed to have a little more substance… but I’m guessing it’s mostly going to go in soup, more butter, and some pies.  But, it’s easy enough to blend it after it thaws.

To freeze it, I just filled quart freezer bags with 4 cups of mash.

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A neat way to get the air out is to stick a straw into the bag and suck as you seal it up.

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Okay, I’m getting close to ending the freezing of the pumpkin.  Of course, my hands are all slimed up with pumpkin.  I wash my hands and realize…

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… something is missing.  I know I had a bandage on my freshly cut finger.  I know it hasn’t been off that finger for very long.  I know I didn’t have it when I went to wash my hands.  For crying out loud, where could it be?

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Oh no.  I had a pretty strong suspicion I knew where the bandage was.  See, the masher did a decent job of mashing the pumpkins, but every once in awhile, there was a piece the masher didn’t get.  I’d just stick my hand in that goop and mush it with my hands.  So, I went “fishing”.

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It didn’t take long until I found what I was looking for.

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Yeah, I just tossed it… the bandage, that is.  I’m not going to waste good pumpkin.  I just marked the package extra special so I knew which one not to eat myself.

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Finally, I finished getting all of the extra pumpkin and was ready to start in on the pumpkin butter.

Following is what you will need to make a batch of pumpkin butter.  I actually made a double batch.  However, I went the slow cooker route to cook the butter (cause there is no stirring or watching or any of that crap) and I quickly realized that my concoction was a little much for a standard slow cooker.

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It was a little messy.  If you want to double the recipe, do so at your own risk 🙂

* 4 cups pumpkin puree

* 1 cup brown sugar

* 1/2 cup white sugar

* 3/4 cup apple juice

* 1 Tbs vanilla

* 1/4 tsp allspice

* 1/4 tsp ground cloves

* 1/4 tsp ground ginger

* 1/2 tsp nutmeg

* 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

* 1 Tbs lime juice

That’s it.  Mix it all together and throw it in the slow cooker.  I cooked the double batch for about 12 hours overnight on high in the slow cooker.  A smaller batch probably won’t take quite as long.  Make sure you tilt the lid on the cooker so that a lot of the the moisture cooks off.

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You want your pumpkin butter to be nice and thick… you know, so that sticks to the back of a spoon.  You want it spreadable.  I love that word: spreadable. Sounds kind of sexy, doesn’t it?  Sweet and spreadable.

While I’m getting prepared to cook this overnight, the wife says to me, “Uh, that slow cooker looks a little full,”

“Yeah,” I say, “I want lots of butter.”

“You realize that is going to make a mess, right,” the wife says.

“Don’t worry,” I say.  “I’ll clean it up.”

Well, you see, I have this little habit of saying I’ll clean stuff up and then, for some reason, I never really clean it up.  Or rather, I don’t clean it up fast enough for the wife and she ends up cleaning it up herself.  Long story short, the wife doesn’t let me cook my pumpkin butter in the kitchen.  I am relegated to complete my cooking project in the basement.

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After about 12 hours, my slow cooker full of goodness…

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…had reduced to the perfect consistency.  Too bad so much of it was water.

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All that work and I get a couple of jars of pumpkin butter.

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I was trying to decide if I wanted to process the butter by canning to make it last longer (which isn’t apparently recommended), but I decided that it wasn’t going to take long for the family to go through what I had made.  I stuck one jar in the fridge for now and one jar in the freezer for later.  The hardest part was preparing the pumpkin.  The rest was a cake walk.  It sure is good… and I have the reassurance that if I want to make more, I’ve got plenty of pumpkin to make that happen.

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Now, I just need to figure out what I am going to do with my squash…

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