Pumpkins!

I've been waiting all year for Hemmeter Farms to have their pumpkins and today was the day :) (They may have had them last week or something, but I wasn't aware of it, so...)

We swung by Hemmeter's and while they don't have ALL of their pumpkins out yet (like they do closer to Halloween), they had plenty of massive massive pumpkins.

We picked up this beauty for $4.50 (the one on the right!).
We weighed it when we got home - 51 pounds. So...yes, this pumpkin cost us about 8.8 cents per pound.

I wasn't sure how to cut into it - last year, I tried a variety of knives but was having a lot of trouble. The pumpkin flesh is something like 3-4 inches thick which is fine but the skin (in the past) was very very tough. This year, Stacey offered to help me butcher the pumpkin for roasting.

We took it out to our porch, washed it and then....

After about...2 minutes, it was basically done (cut into 3 main pieces).

You can see just how HUGE this pumpkin is!

Stacey butchered the rest of it into manageable pieces, then we took them inside for seed scooping.

Just for kicks, here are the photo taken timestamps:
3:36pm - Stacey begins cutting the pumpkin
3:39pm - Stacey finishes
3:46pm - Stacey and Matt start scooping the seeds
3:52pm - Stacey and Matt finish

So...about 9 minutes work to turn

into

The next step for this pumpkin is roasting. Unfortunately, I can only fit about 4 of these pieces in the oven at a time and it's taking something like 100-120 minutes to roast it. When they're soft, I'll puree them and freeze the puree.

Not too much work for a TON of fresh (well, frozen) pumpkin puree!