It’s not a real wonder that people just buy cans of pumpkin for making pies, or pumpkin pie filling.
Yesterday (after a week and a half of asking what I should bring) my sister asked me to be responsible for making pies for Thanksgiving this year.
Yay.
Now I had a pumpkin from Halloween I wanted to preserve, so I agreed, thinking I could make some classic pumpkin pie from scratch. I also had a bag of tart apples left over from apple butter (which I got 13 pints out of) that were somewhat past their prime and would be good for a pie as well. And a pudding pie I have been meaning to make for ages. Seemed like a good opportunity to stretch my pie making skills.
Oops.
I forgot the cutting pumpkin takes muscle. Real muscle, like kneading 4 loaves of bread type of muscle. And doing a whole pumpkin? That takes endurance. Like “hand whipping two pitchers of eggnog and whipped cream” kind of endurance. Can I do those things? Heck yes I can! Do I want to? Err….
Suffice to say, I spent some 6 hours chopping up pumpkin chunks and apples, getting them prepped and finally managing to preserve four quarts of pumpkin for later.
Every year I have a newfound respect for my mother who had to do all these things as a child and kept doing them for the rest of her life. It’s a particularly sharp reminder this year, as this will be the first year that she’s no longer with us. I feel a bit lost without her.
I wish I had also listened more. So much knowledge left our family with her and will be a struggle to regain. Her years on a farm during the end of the depression would have been invaluable to me now, but those are also gone. If I had listened when I had the chance, maybe I wouldn’t have had to over cook my pumpkin pie because I didn’t boil the water out of the cooked pumpkin.
Oops again.
But I did it. I made the pies. The apple pie is nearly perfect. And tomorrow promises to be a bright day.
Nearly perfect apple pie 🙂
quarteracrehome 
If you cut the pumpkin up first then bake it in the oven, let cool, it is much easier to remove the skin and the water has baked out of the flesh. Then you put it in the blender to purée.
I don’t have a blender (only a mini food processor that hold about 2C), so hand mashing was ideal for me. But I could have mashed it and then cooked it down, the way my mom used to. Derp. As it stands it was still good!
How you had happy holidays! I’m sorry to hear about your mother passing…well be think of you. I miss seeing you on Facebook! Your pie looked wonderful, great job!
Unfortunately Facebook will not let me reinstate or remove my account without submitting to them my legal state photo ID. Which is a direct violation of my privacy and personal rights, so I will never have access to that account again. At best, I may be able to get it shut down.
Someone (holly something or another) who disagreed with a post I made after she friended me decided to report my account and get it taken down over some petty SJW issue. Turns out she was notorious for doing exactly that.