The Life of a Fall Pumpkin

I love all things pumpkin! I love their color and many shapes. I love to decorate with them and can't wait to have a real house with a real front door where I can do a big Martha Stewart-esk fall display. And...I love to eat all things pumpkin. And at the first HINT of cooler weather I bust out the best pumpkin bread recipe (Sarah McKenna's mother's recipe) which has become a staple in our house, and I could easily finish off a pumpkin pie by myself. 

A week or so before Halloween Owen and I were at the Children's Museum and he was in the grocery area "buying food for dinner". He brought over a plastic pumpkin. I said, "Oh this is great, should we use it to make a yummy pumpkin pie?" He said very matter-of-fact "You don't eat pumpkins."(He had only ever seen me use canned pumpkin while baking.) I then realized that my child had no idea that pumpkins are first and foremost a food. So I took it on as a challenge to teach Owen all the ways we can enjoy pumpkins through the fall from decorations to food. Here is the journey of our Halloween pumpkin. Owen took part in every aspect of its life (except the picking, we got it at a downtown Halloween activity). 

All done. It was yummy, but not quite as good as my sister in law Arwen's. I prefer canned pumpkin pie to fresh, but she's mastered the homemade pumpkin pie.

This pumpkin provided double the amount of pumpkin I needed for the pie so I just froze it. Just last week I was craving some pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and didn't have any more canned pumpkin in the house. So I dug out the rest of the frozen pumpkin and "winged it". The muffins turned out ok, little different texture, but still yummy! At the end of this adventure, Owen learned that pumpkins do in fact produce food. It was a good Mommy moment to teach him a life lesson.