Pumpkin Butter- recipe and printable page

My family always gets pie pumpkins for Halloween. They don't make the best carving pumpkins, but they have a lot of seeds for their small size and the best pumpkin "meat" for making pumpkin butter.

Pumpkin butter doesn't have all the fat that pumpkin pie filling has and it's a fantastic source for vitamin A and C. It does have a fair amount of sugar, but I don't mind that as much knowing that it's not all empty calories. 

Pumpkin butter is not a good candidate for home canning because it doesn't have the acid necessary to keep botulism from growing. So I put it in the freezer. We carve our pumpkins on Halloween itself and put them on plates with led lights in them. I leave them out over night because it's just cold enough here to do that. They won't rot, but without the plates they might freeze to my stairs (it happened once! They were stuck there until a passing moose came up the stairs to eat them)

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Pumpkin Butter - make 5-6 pints

Ingredients:

3 Pie Pumpkins

1 Tablespoon Pumpkin Pie Spice

1 Tsp. Cinnamon

1 cup brown sugar

Apple Juice

To Make Pumpkin Puree

Cut pumpkins in half and scoop out the center fiber and seeds. Pie pumpkins have a lot of seeds, so set them aside to toast and eat or to plant next spring.

Cut off and discard stems and cut the pumpkins into chunks.

Steam in 1/2 cup water until soft. Pull out chunks and scrap the pumpkin meat off the skin. Discard pumpkin skin and put the pumpkin back into the pan.

Use a stick blender or potato masher to make a nice soft puree.

Add spices and sugar, simmer over low heat, stirring often until it's cooked down by about half.

If it gets too thick, add some apple juice, if it's too thin to use as a spread, keep cooking it down.

Let cool and ladle into freezer safe containers. Put one in the fridge for immediate consumption and the rest in the freezer.

My family loves to eat grilled pumpkin butter and cream cheese sandwiches. We butter two slices of bread and spread pumpkin butter over one (plain butter side down). Then cut 1/4 slices of firm cream cheese and put that on the pumpkin spread. Put the other piece of bread over it, butter side up. Put it in a frying pan over medium heat and cook until it's browned and toasted on one side, flip over, repeat. The cream cheese melts at a fairly low temp so by that point,it's ready to serve. 

For the seeds- my daughter likes chili pumpkin seeds, so after cleaning off all the fibery bits, we toss them with olive oil and 1 tsp. good chili powder, 1/4 tsp each garlic powder, cumin, onion powder and oregano. Then spread them on a cookie sheet and toast until just barely browned.