The Pumpkin Chronicles

The story you are about to hear is true.  Only the names have been changed to protect the cranky.

It was a cold weekend in January--the kind that makes you want to curl up inside and turn the oven on.  Some people even put things IN the oven.  Our heroine, let's call her T---, decided this would be the perfect weekend to bake the rest of the pumpkins in storage.

Having learned the hard (an REALLY time-consuming) way that when a recipe says to cut & peel a fresh pumpkin that the author is completely delusional, T---- decided to employ the time-tested secret method revealed to her in hushed tones by one older and wiser....take one pumpkin

one plastic bag

combine,

then smack the daylights out of them on some firm surface

like the back patio.  This is also an amazing method for spraying pumpkin bits all over the patio if one uses a weaker plastic bag or repeats the process with the same bag once too often.

An hour later, after scraping all the strings and seeds out of all the pumpkin pieces and placed them in the oven to roast, our heroine thought this might be a good time to move the smaller hubbard squashes off the floor and into the shelving.....until she dropped one.  Then she decided that she might as well bake one or two of the "small" ones.  After all, as long as one is going to freeze a few bags of pumpkin puree, one might as well freeze a few more......

Problems might have been averted if our heroine had stopped at ONE small hubbard squash.  But compared to the two 35-pound monsters still in the garage, the 10-pound ones looked so small and harmless......

In another two hours, the freezers at....oh, let's call it "Chateau S-G".......were bursting with bags of pumpkin & squash puree.  One large loaf and 4 small loaves of pumpkin bread were baking.  Our intrepid heroine was inventing a creamy pumpkin pasta sauce (which was excellent, by the way).  And there was still a mixing bowl full of squash pulp to contend with. 

The only excuse T---- can offer for the next step was that she was really, really, REALLY tired and that perhaps 5 hours in the kitchen wrestling with squash had finally made her brain snap.  She found a recipe for.......pumpkin walnut fudge. 

The recipe called for corn syrup, but after an experiment dealing with the elimination of ANY corn syrup from her diet, T--- decided that she would substitute honey instead, having read in a book somewhere that this would work and having, like many avid readers, a foolish tendency to believe things she read in books. 

Now the wonderful thing about recipes on the internet is that other people who have attempted the recipes can write reviews--suggesting changes, telling whether or not the recipe actually worked, and other useful information.  Which of course only helps if one bothers to check the reviews before plunging straight in. 

One scorched pan & one destroyed candy thermometer later....

and our heroine had a pan of nutty pumpkin-caramel goo, which is NEVER going to solidify into anything that could remotely resemble fudge, and is so flamingly sugary that more than a small taste would probably send one straight into a diabetic coma. Just like most of the 28 reiews said it would.  

Once our heroine has spent some time in the hot tub while chanting "those who publish recipes online are not all sadists,"  she will be calm enough to deal with the remaining bowl of pumpkin puree without killing someone......