Henny Penny and processing pumpkins

One of the chickens, Henny Penny, has figured out how to get out of the chicken pen. She always goes back into the hen house at night, but she likes foraging for her own food...

... sometimes her foraging is just outside the chicken yard...

... almost as if she is taunting her less creative chicken buddies!

As I wrote on this blog, few weeks ago, we gleaned a number of pie pumpkins at a local farmer's field (https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2022/10/gleaning-pumpkins.html). Since we got back from Dominican Republic, I have been working on getting them processed from pumpkin to puree. The first set that I did, we tried making into pumpkin soup. We have tried to make pumpkin soup a couple of times in the past year or so, but it never came out that good -- I had decided to try it one last time, and if it didn't work, to give up! 

I used the recipe that we like for Butternut Squash soup (https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/instant-pot-butternut-squash-soup/#tasty-recipes-62787 - it has a Granny Smith apple and carrot to add sweetness, and we found that putting 1/2 a block of cream cheese in at the end makes it nice and creamy). For the pumpkin soup, I also added pumpkin pie spice. It turned out pretty good, though we like it even better if we stir in a spoonful of honey and add more pumpkin pie spice to the bowl at the table. So... we decided that we should go ahead and process all of the pumpkins so we would only have puree to carry with us (in the freezer).

The first set of pumpkins I used the Instant Pot to process, but... it is limited in how many I can do at one time, so the second time...

... we tried using the oven. I was still limited on space, but could do more -- doing some in the Instant Pot, and others in the oven.

We found that the ones done in the oven were not as "cooked" as in the Instant Pot, so it was a little easier to scrape the flesh out -- but I'm a little concerned that the flesh may not be cooked enough if it isn't cooked some more -- so I've got those bags of puree in the freezer marked specifically as being for making soup. The Instant Pot ones could be used in pumpkin bread or soup -- but were harder to scrape out because the skin was so soft.

Before the pumpkins went into the Instant Pot or the oven, we cut them open and scraped out all the seeds and inside stuff...

... and then dumped that over into the chicken yard -- the chickens were *very* happy with that gift!

A picture in the midst of processing -- empty shells that have already been scraped in the pink bowl, puree in the bowl with the teal spatula that I'm measuring out into the zipper bag to go into the freezer. I try to measure out what is in the bag in the freezer so I know what size recipe it will serve to make.

These are shells before scraping that were done in the Instant Pot, cooling on a rack so we can then scrape them.

We picked up 15 pie pumpkins from the field. One was bad inside (so the chickens got all of that one) -- so we've processed 14 pumpkins and have puree for making soup and bread down the road!