The Popular Pumpkin Post

It seems like every blogger is posting something about pumpkins - from the canned pumpkin shortage (is that happening again?) to carving and painting to preserving and baking. For once, I'm following along because this was the first year I actually cleaned and cooked my own pumpkin. For the few years that I've been baking, I've bought canned pumpkin because I assumed it would be too much work to get my own pumpkin pulp. While it's still definitely quicker just to grab a can, roasting and preserving pumpkin is really not difficult.

Here's some of my proof:

Here's a good set of pictures and steps for roasting and preserving a pumpkin. I tried making pumpkin spice cookies, but they flopped. The rest is going in the freezer for Thanksgiving dessert.

I also roasted the seeds! Who knew that would be so easy too?

Here's a great set of instructions for roasting pumpkin seeds. I baked them for about 45 minutes, shaking the pan every 10 minutes to prevent burning. After that, I shut the oven off and let the seeds finish drying in the residual heat.

And on to another topic, I gathered the first bag of pecans for this season. Thanks to my neighbor, this is no longer back-breaking work. He saw me bending over to pick up the nuts and let me borrow this handy tool.

You just gently push on a pecan on the ground, and it goes through the wires into the little cage. Wonderful invention. Do they even make these anymore?

And to round out this food post, I'm sharing Nikki's Blueberry Mud Muffins.

So they're not really made of mud, but we started calling them that because of the brownish color. Nikki substituted the sugar and butter with Smucker's blackberry fruit spread, and it was delicious! The fruit spread just made it a funky brown color with a purplish tint. I don't know the entire recipe - just that she was experimenting with a gluten- and dairy-free version. But the fruit spread was in proportion to the amount of sugar and butter that the recipe called for. They were good enough that I'm asking her to make them again...