Home Grown Food

For Thanksgiving, in addition to turkey and a squash casserole, we prepared two food items that had organic roots : a salad using Black Seeded Simpson lettuce that we grew in a container garden and pumpkin pies made from our Fairy Tale pumpkins that we bought at a farmer's market in south Alabama.  Both turned out really well, especially the pumpkin pies. 

I found the recipe for the pumpkin pies at http://www.pickyourown.org/pumpkinpie.php.  The Fairy Tale pumpkins were easy to work with; however, they were more watery after baking in the oven than we anticipated.  After scooping the pumpkin out from the skin, I lined a colander with paper towels to allow the water, and not the pumpkin, to drain through.  It took over an hour to drain--I put a container under the colander just to see how much "pumpkin water" it held and it was quite a lot!  I'm glad we did that or else our pumpkin pies would have been really watery. 

Funny thing, though, was that, after seeing how much baked pumpkin there was, we thought we had enough pumpkin to fill four pies but once the water drained out, it was just enough for two pies--the pumpkin glop shrunk right before our eyes!  At the grocery store, I found some organic eggs from free range chickens (chickens that are not fed growth hormones) and used those in the pumpkin pies as well.  We hope to get a few chickens ourselves one day for eggs and also for fertilizer for my husband's gardening.

Fairy Tale Pumpkin Pies