Old Pumpkin

Remember the pumpkin? The one I bought for Halloween then never got around to carving… . Well, I finally got around to it. I couldn’t believe the thing could sit around for so long and still be good, but it seemed fine – no soft spots or discoloration or odor – so I carved it up with an eye toward eating it and/or maybe leaving a thin, dry shell that I could reuse as a Halloween decoration in the future. In not either of those, then simply to see what an ancient pumpkin was like.

What it’s like is stringy.

You can see from the first cut-open shot, the glossy strings that you usually have to scrape as the second step of Jack O Lantern making had dried along with the seeds. I went ahead and cook the seeds with salt, and we ate them, but they weren’t nearly as good. The outsides were unusually woody and tough and the insides dry, but still nutty.

Once that was all scraped away, I started scraping out the wall of the pumpkin, trying to thin it for my shell effect and also get usable pumpkin. It was easier to scrape out than a fresh pumpkin, but the walls had developed the consistency of spaghetti squash.

Things went well until I got too confident, and put a hole in the skin of the pumpkin.
So much for drying it out as a future decoration. I simply couldn’t get it whittled down far enough without damaging the delicate exterior.

What I wanted was to make a pumpkin soup I dimly recalled having seen. The picture of the soup showed a smooth, creamy concoction. I was never able to achieve this.

First I boiled some of the pumpkin while freezing most of it. I thought I could boil it apart, but after a couple of hours, I tossed in some seasoning and ate it like I would squash, which is what it tasted like.

Next I took out the frozen pumpkin and put it through the blender. I ended up with something the size and shape of course-ground coffee. No matter how long I ran the Cuisinart, it would get no smaller. Once again, boiling would not smooth it out.

It didn’t taste like much, and I ended up tossing it out.

So… pumpkins have amazing shelf life, but I don’t recommend leaving them too long.

If anyone knows of a good pumpkin soup recipe, let me know.