Is this a Charlie Brown tribute? Or was it Linus? I never can remember.
Well, Bethany and I found a White Pumpkin at the store the other day. Since we are all about pumpkins and squashes, now that she's on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, we picked up this beauty, and decided to give it a try.
Baking pumpkin from scratch is not difficult.
First I wash the outside with dishsoap and my scrubber. Then I plunk it, as you see here in the top picture, into the baking dish. Oven at three fifty until it smells done.
What does "done" smell like? Burning rind. It's not rocket science.
Once it's baked, it is soft. The skin is no longer rind-like, but is rather fragile and easy to peel back. After that it's just a matter of cutting it apart, scraping the seeds out and (which is much easier after it's baked than before), and scooping out the good stuff.
In this case I decided some of the flesh was still a bit on the firm side. So it is now in the steamer, getting even softer.
What, you ask, does a white pumpkin taste like? Well, this one is not sweet at all. It is rather bland and a bit squashy...but will make an EXCELLENT potato substitute, I think, for those of us banned from eating potatoes.
For a sweet tooth, get those little pie pumpkins, or a butternut squash. And acorn squash can also be sweet, depending the blessings of the random squash sweetness fairy. A large orange pumpkin is not as sweet as the smaller ones, and a bit stringy, similar but not as pronounced as spaghetti squash.
A wonderful thing to have in the oven on a fall day that feels cool just by virtue of it being "not hot".
Comments
Thank you for sharing your expertise!