Day 93 - The Garden

Today started brilliantly. The weather was cooler all morning--which was a wonderful change--and Andy came in with our first really good tomato harvest,then I found some cucumbers that should have been picked a week ago, but haven't turned yellow yet.
Then we (I) decided we (we) should make something with our pumpkin crop. I had borrowed a recipe book from the library that had a recipe for pumpkin butter, which sounded promising. We discovered that anything involving pureed pumpkin really isn't safe to can, but it would be okay to freeze. So, I picked a recipe that said it would produce 3 8-ounce jars of pumpkin butter. That sounded like a good amount.

It called for 4 medium-sized squash/pumpkins, peeled, seeded, and cubed. There are no pictures of that part, as we're not ready to laugh about that yet. I'll just say it involved 2 hours, almost every knife we own, one of Andy's woodworking saws, and I think we'll be finding pumpkin seeds in the kitchen for another week.

Fruit "butters" cook down a great deal, so while I was surprised that 4 pumpkins would produce 3 jars, I was willing to believe the recipe--presumably someone who writes a cookbook knows what he/she is doing. It now seems that there are some other possibilities--the author can just have a mean streak, might not be able to do math, or there was a typo and it was really meant to be 30 jars. It filled 2 stockpots:
I can't decide if it's a good or bad thing that it did turn out really well. On the one hand, I'd hate to spend 6 hours making something that we didn't like, but on the other hand, it's a bit unfortunate that you both really like something that you plan to never make again. Of course, depending on how long this stuff can last in the freezer, we aren't going to need to think about that for a while--possibly years.