Pumpkin Pie & Butternut Squash

In the spirit of Halloween, I made some pumpkin pies last night to bring to the Boys Club today. I hope they're good!!

I based my recipe on this one: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pumpkin-Pie-II/Detail.aspx
Most pumpkin pie recipes call for heavy cream or sweetened condensed milk, but I chose this one because it calls for only regular milk. That's good, both from an economy standpoint (I already had milk, but not cream!), and from a health standpoint, since heavy cream and sweetened condensed milk are quite fatty. I made several other changes to the recipe:

1 - Instead of canned pumpkin puree, I used fresh pumpkin that I got at Hilltop Farms last week. We grew pumpkins in the Boys Club Garden this year, but none of them made it this late in the season! We'll have to grow more next year. So anyway, one "pie pumpkin" is usually enough to make about two pies. (Or, instead of letting it go bad on your front stoop, you can use your leftover jack-o-lantern!!) First you need to cook the pumpkin - the best results are from baking it until it gets soft (between 30 mins and an hour, depending), though you can also cut it into chunks and boil or steam it on the stove. Then, let it cool off a bit, and scoop the meat of the pumpkin out of the skin. Toss (or compost!) the skin, but save all the meat and mash it or run it through a blender or food processor. Presto, you have pumpkin puree!

2 - This recipe calls for 2.5 cups of sugar - whoa! Even divided between two pies, that sounded like a lot, so I used just 1 cup of sugar. The result is very nice - sweet, but not so sweet that you can't taste the pumpkin and the spices.

Otherwise, I followed the recipe pretty closely, and I think it came out pretty well! I hope the boys like it.

Next week, I'll be bringing butternut squashes with me to the garden for the boys to take home, so I wanted to direct you to some info and recipes for butternut squash. For one thing, you can use butternut squash instead of pumpkin in the pie recipe above - it has a very similar texture, and it's even more naturally sweet than a pumpkin! Butternut squash can also be baked and eaten plain with butter and/or brown sugar, and it's also commonly made into soup. Here are some pages all about butternut squash:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/products/produce/wintersquash.html
http://www.reluctantgourmet.com/butternut_spuash.htm

Good luck, and have fun!