Tomorrow night is Halloween. Come the next morning, where will your Jack-o-lanterns be? Shattered on the street, in the garbage, or in the kitchen? I have strongly advocated eating pumpkins after their “big night.” One of our favorite uses for pumpkin is pumpkin bread.
It’s a traditional treat in my family. When I married Michelle, pumpkin bread became yet another “two-recipe treat.” I think the recipe below is my mother’s.
Aly’s Harvest Festival Jack-o-lantern, minimally carved to maximize edible pumpkin when she got it home (Photo: Aly Zeiger).
Here’s our family’s recipe for pumpkin bread:
½ Cup sugar
¼ Tsp baking powder
1 Tsp soda
¾ Tsp salt
½ Tsp cloves
½ Tsp cinnamon
1 2/3 Cup flour
½ Cup salad oil
½ Cup water
1 Cup pumpkin
2 eggs
nuts or raisins (optional)
mix above and pour into loaf pans. Bake 1½ hours at 350° or until done.
This bread is great for breakfast, desserts, or snacks. When we feel extremely decadent, we might butter it, but it’s excellent plain. It can easily be baked in muffin tins if you prefer.
Ha! That’s a fine idea, except that we help put on the pumpkin patch at our Church, and when the “big day” is over, we have several HUNDRED left over.
We donate them to the San Antonio Zoo. I don’t think the critters need the recipe, but they make sure that not much goes to waste :^).
This year, we’ll have helped people adopt over 1000 pumpkins, with another 800 or so going to our furry friends. I hear the elephants particularly enjoy playing with their food before lunch.
Don, I’m so conflicted here–it’s great that the animals get fed, but it’s so sad that people don’t know how good pumpkin can be. The poor could be fed by your pumpkins, too. I’ve heard of how elephants like to eat pumpkins, and how zoo keepers will hide other treats and/or medicine inside them.
I kinda felt that way too, but you gotta remember, these are carving pumpkins (gords, really), not pie pumpkins (squash), so you wind up throwing away about 1/3 of the material inside because it’s too stringy and tough to even bother with.
And the things don’t keep down here the way they do up north… we’ve probably thrown away 200 rotting pumpkins in the last month.
I thought the Jimenez Thanksgiving folks (“http://www.rauljimenezdinner.com/”) would take them, but it’s even too much work for them.
Quick update: We had more pumpkins than the Zoo could use left over, so we gave the rest to the “Snake Farm”, another animal attraction in a near-by town. And we STILL have more pumpkins to get rid of (sigh).
I know that most of the country was in a “pumpkin shortage” this year, but our provider showed no sign of it. They made an unexpected delivery the last weekend (the third delivery of the season) and try as we might, we just couldn’t get rid of them all.
Oh well, the animals will have lots of treats this year.
That’s right, Don, there was supposed to be a pumpkin shortage this year, wasn’t there? Something happened–I noticed that in Haines they’re going for 10 cents/lb less this year than they did last year.