How To: Cook with pumpkins in the oven

In this video, Curtis Smith from Southwest Yard & Garden is joined by Bernadillo County Home Economist Patricia Aaron to talk to us about cooking with pumpkins. There's probably no vegetable that anounces the arrival of fall like a pumpkin. When you're using a pumpkin to make piesm cakes, and so forth, you want to choose a medium-sized one. Smaller pumpkins can make good side dishes. Bear in mind, it takes a bought a half pound of cooked pumpkin to make one serving. Here, we're using a nice medium sized pumpkin, and it's cut in half. We're going to be shown how to bake it so it's preserved for either future or immediate use. Once the pumpkin's cut in half, you must remove all the seeds and fibers. This is the hardest work of the whole thing. You want to take everything but the flesh out, and then rinse it, and then turn it upside-down. You can save the seeds, wash them and dry them. Then toss 1 cup of dried seeds with 1 teaspoon of vegetable oil. Put them on a baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes at 350 degrees. stir occassinaly, and you'll have roasted pumpkin seeds - a nutritious snack! Next we return to our pumpkin that was cut in half. This goes in the oven for one hour at 350 degrees, or until tender. Now you've got cooked squash. What we do next is just scrape it out with a big spoon or ice cream scooper and put it into a bowl. NExt we run a mixer through it, and what happens is that the string adhere to the beaters, an easy way to get the strings out. Now you're eady to use it, or freeze it in a freezer container for future use (don't use baggies or you'll get freezer burn). When freezing in a freezer container, leave about an inch of head space and you can freeze it for up to 12 months.