The Pumpkin Transforms!

I have really learned a lot about nature, science, and spirituality through gardening. Now I can add cooking skills to the knowledge I have obtained through gardening. I have baked pumpkin dishes before with canned pumpkin from a store, but I certainly have never prepared a raw pumpkin before. I cut the pumpkin in half and scooped out all the seeds. Some of the seeds I saved to roast and some I saved to grow future pumpkins. The Galeux D'Eysines has a nice orange flesh but is a little thicker than a carving pumpkin.

 Thank goodness for the internet! I learned that I needed to bake the pumpkin for and hour or until it became tender. It was really neat because the actual skin I discovered was very thin and peeled right off. Nearly all of the pumpkin is edible.

I made the baked pumpkin flesh into a pumpkin bar. I got the recipe on the internet also. It tasted heavenly. Like a pumpkin pie without the useless pie crust. There is a oat crust underneath the pumpkin filling. I was pretty worried about this recipe because the filling was very runny like water, but it did eventually set and cooked perfectly. I didn't even use half of my pumpkin to make the bars. I froze the rest in the freezer for later uses. I also still have two more pumpkins in the garden so I don't have to worry about any national pumpkin shortages for a while.