One of my daughters-in-law that grew up on the farm went to make a pumpkin pie. She wanted to do it “from scratch”. She had only seen canned pumpkin so she thought when you cut up the pumpkin it would be soft inside. I thought maybe some others do not know and I am not sure where I learned so I will post some pictures of the pumpkin. First is the picture of the pumpkin we painted a face on (left from fall holidays) so we could roast it and mash it into cooking pumpkin for pies and baked goods. The pumpkin did not sit in a warm place too long. Here in North Georgia cool nights and warm days can rot a vegetable pretty quickly. The pumpkin was sliced and roasted and then I used my Ninja blender to make puree.*
Of course you can cook and eat a pumpkin as a roasted squash such as acorn, cut and roasted you can add oil or butter and seasonings that you prefer. Then we scooped out the string in the center and separated the seeds. I had some bacon grease in the baking pan from earlier so I stirred the seeds in the grease before roasting with a little sea salt.

That was a hit but I should have set them on paper towels at the end because they did come out a bit too greasy. I tried to warm them a second time to wipe off some the grease and I think that would have worked but I let them burn, they were already pretty toasted. Sometimes my switching multitasking gets the better of me and I have too many things going at once. I really hate to spoil food.
So we made puree and I froze it. It seemed a little wet but when I began to thaw the first to use I found the plastic freezer bags leaked. I put two cups per quart bag so that I could either double the recipe or make two things for each bunch of thawed pumpkin.

What worked is to put it in a bowl as it thawed and since the puree lost some of the water, the pumpkin puree was actually more the texture of canned so I used it like that. It was almost good to have less water. Haven’t made cookies yet but I am thinking about that. I have been experimenting with no gluten or decreased (for many reasons, see health posts) The cobbler I made had blueberries and apples with the pumpkin. Not sure I liked that combination. The apple and pumpkin muffins worked well and the apples helped the gluten free flours not be so dry and crumbly. I finally broke down and used more tapioca flour and that also helped.*1

*I recently acquired the least expensive Ninja food blender, after seeing and using one my son had. I would like the more expensive model because we had to hold the lid to keep it grinding. It worked and I am not a huge food processor theses days. Might like the bigger food processor, if I was producing the food for a large family. It worked great for chopping zucchini for zucchini burgers, but this one is great for most of our ordinary needs.