Pumpkin Season is Here: Pumpkin Recipes & Fun Facts!

 

 

 

 

Time to Get Bootiful!
Pumpkin Recipes & Fun Facts!

Every direction you look, we are slowly being invaded by pumpkins!  From grocery stores to offices, pumpkins of every color, shape, and size can be found everywhere right now.

Halloween is quickly approaching and of course Thanksgiving Day is right on its tail, not only to we decorate pumpkins, we eat them in some form or another as well.  Here are a few fun facts about pumpkins that you may not have known and a few fresh pumpkin recipes to try!

I love toasted pumpkin seeds. Each year we all guess how many seeds are in the pumpkin boefore we cut it up. I usually win 🙂 Then we toast them with some olive oil or butter and sea salt. Yumm!

I hate to throw away a perfectly good pumpkin so I cut off the skin and cut it up and boil it until mushy. Once it’s cool, put 1 Cup per ziplock bag and freeze later for making pumpkin bread, muffins, cookies, whatever. It helps to strain the pumpkin to get the extra water out before bagging. Fresh pumpkin taste NOTHING like the stuff in a can!

P.S. Don’t bother cooking up a jack-o-lantern that was cut a week ago. You want fresh, not moldy pumpkin. I let the kids cut up the pumpkin Halloween day and then we cook it the next day.

Pumpkin Facts

Pumpkins contain seeds, so they are actually defined as a fruit, however most of us if not all of use say that pumpkins are a vegetable. Pumpkins are loaded with Vitamin A, and are part of the squash family. They require a minimum 3 months of good weather to mature, making them very hard to grow in Alaska. Most contain pumpkins contain 1 cup of seeds. Chris Stevens grew the largest pumpkin last October.  This beauty weighed in at 1,810.5 pounds!

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread

Ingredients:

1 cups Stevia/Splenda
1 cup Splenda Brown Sugar Blend
2 cups canned or fresh pumpkin
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup fat-free vanilla pudding
4 large egg whites
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
Cooking spray

Directions:

I like to use the Splenda Brown Sugar Blend for baking. It’s half brown sugar and half Splenda, allowing baked goods to get a brown crust on top, just like goodies made with regular sugar, but it has half the calories.

Preheat oven to 350°. Combine first 5 ingredients in a large bowl, stirring well with a whisk. Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour, cinnamon, salt, and baking soda in a medium bowl, stirring well with a whisk. Add flour mixture to pumpkin mixture, stirring just until moist. Stir in chocolate chips. Spoon batter into 2 (8 x 4-inch) loaf pans coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350° for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes in pans on a wire rack, and remove from pans. Cool completely on wire rack. Makes 32 servings.