Cooking pumpkin, the hands off method

Shelly / CC BY 2.0

I’m a stay at home dad which involves shuttling kids back and forth. Traveling in and out of the house constantly. Cooking items like pumpkin that take longer than say 30 minutes doesn’t fit into my schedule very well.

A week or so ago, I noticed that there were still a large number of pumpkins on our front steps. Left over cast offs from decorating for Halloween. As usual I couldn’t bare to throw them away, so I started to formulate a plan. I didn’t have any immediate needs for pumpkin, which left me with cooking it, and freezing it so I could use it at a later date. The problem was that I really didn’t want the oven on when I wasn’t in the house. I needed another way to cook the pumpkin.

The solution: A crockpot. This method does involve prepping the pumpkin by cleaning the pumpkin first, but I could then cook it without worrying about leaving for an hour or so.

1. Cut the top of the pumpkin off and remove all seeds.
2. Cut the pumpkin into wedges. Just continue halving each piece until it is manageable.
3. Peel the wedges.
4. Cube the pieces into approximately 2 inch chunks.
5. Cook the chunks in the crockpot on low for approximately 3 hours. The smaller the pieces, the less time it will take. Just test the pumpkin by poking with a fork.
6. Remove pumpkin from crockpot and mash with a potato masher.
7. Let cool and freeze.