It’s not necessarily a good idea to start cultivating seeds for your vegetable garden when commuting to a new job 4 days a week. Come spring 2022, I literally threw some pumpkin seeds in to my vegetable garden and nothing came of them. The lack of attention was obvious, and I wasn’t even really sure if pumpkin seeds could thrive in a raised vegetable garden bed in a northern hemisphere climate. The following year, I conducted the same experiment and grew a seedling indoors, planted it outside when it was seemingly warm enough, and then waited it for it to sort of dry off and die. But, little did I know that a jungle was about to grow from that small seedling that produced 3 BIG pumpkins.
Funny thing is that the pumpkin didn’t exactly turn out to be pumpkin coloured on the outer surface – but it sure did pack a punch on the inside. Pumpkin is incredibly nutritious. According to wikipedia.org pumpkin contains:
In a 100-gram (3.5 oz) amount, raw pumpkin provides 110 kilojoules (26 kilocalories) of food energy and is an excellent source (20% or more the Daily Value, DV) of provitamin A beta-carotene and vitamin A (53% DV) (table). Vitamin C is present in moderate content (11% DV), but no other nutrients are in significant amounts (less than 10% DV, table). Pumpkin is 92% water, 6.5% carbohydrate, 0.1% fat and 1% protein(table).
In addition it is very versatile – easy to store, cook and freeze and can be used in all from savoury to sweet dishes. My favourite way of using pumpkin is to bake slices of it in the oven for about 15 min then either mash it up with a fork and use as you would sweet potates with some butter and spices. And then, off course, in a pumpkin pie.
On the left you see the pumpkin slices coming straight after out of the oven – PS the pumpkin skin in very tough, so you need a good and sturdy knife to cut! On the right a very quick and easy pumpkin pie made with ready made pastry dough and filling that takes max 10 min to make. See www.tine.no for some recipes and that is where I got mine from. (FYI it’s in Norwegian)
For this pumpkin pie you will need:
1 ready made pie dough or you can make one yourself
For the filling you will need:
- 400 g pumpkin (pre- oven cooked – it should be fork-able)
- 6 tb plain flour
- ½ ts baking powder
- ½ ts salt
- 1 ts ground cinnamon
- 1 ts ground all spices
- ½ ts ground ginger
- ½ ts ground muscat
- 2 eggs
- 1 ½ dl sugar
- 2 tb melted butter
- 3 dl whipping cream
- 2 ts vanilla sugar
Put all of the ingredients in a bowl and use a hand mixer to blend ingredients together into filling for about 4-5 minutes. Line a pie dish with your pastry dough and cut away any excess at the edges with a knife at the edges. Pour in the mixture in to the pastry case and cook in oven at 180 degrees C for about 30 min. The pie should be firm to the touch in the centre when ready. Serve with or without fruit, whipped cream or ice cream. Enjoy!
Pumpkin is a very nutritious food and in season fairly cheap to come by. So go ahead and try it.
What about the Colour in this story?
First of all my pumpkins – 3 of them – were not pumpkin coloured on the outside. They were rather green and closer to cantaloupe green in colour! Any yes, I know there are numerous species of pumpkins, but this one was decidedly pale grey/green on the outside. This caused some confusion as to know when the pumpkin would be ripe for picking. Would it suddenly turn pumpkin 2 days before being “ready” or would it remain green and start to rot for becoming over-ripe. The fear of all the effort succumbing to frost in early October (for that would for sure be a killer), I cut one loose and inspected it on my kitchen counter top. When I opened it, it was not only fiercely pumpkin in colour, but almost luminescent… orange! And yes it was ripe for the picking!
Pumpkin in my opinion is supposed to be the lower octave of orange. Orange being closer to the primary colour family, pumpkin is a softened, slightly muted and greyed version of orange. When my pumpkin turned out to be so blingingly vibrant, I could not help but compare it to an ordinary orange. They almost look the same. I’m planning on repeating the same exercise this year, ie trying to grow pumpkin in my vegetable garden, again this season. And if luck, water, soil and weather all come together, I am wondering if I will get pumpkin or orange!
Thanks!