Pumpkin Pie

Our garden was covered by thick chords of creeping vine this summer from our five Giant pumpkin plants.
Only one solitary pumpkin made it from this sprawling mass, all the others either dropped off in the heat when they were tiny or got eaten by our mouse (who lives in the wall).

We harvested the only pumpkin about a fortnight ago, before the rain mushed it or rodents got it.

Rosa turned half of it into a really nice soup.

I got the remaining half and found a recipe for Pumpkin pie in "Food from your Garden"

This is a typical 50s recipe consisting, consisting of getting a few good ingredients and basic flavours and lacing them heavily with cream.

• about 200g shortcrust pastry
• 500g Pumpkin
• cream
• 2 egg yolks
• ground cardamom
• ground cinnamon
• sugar! (I forgot)
  

First up, the tricky bit that I got wrong! - Scoop the flesh out of your pumpkin, carefully taking out all the seeds. Next boil it with a little water (it will make it's own juice once it's got going a bit). About 15-20 minutes on a low heat is good, then strain some of the liquid off and sieve it into a puree.

Whilst you're dong this, blind bake some shortcrust pastry for ten minutes. Blind baking is simply baking the pastry on its own in a greased dish with some dried beans to weight it down.

This was where I was having problems as, not having removed all my seeds I had to go through it as ach batch went into the sieve. The other problem was, it wouldn't really go through the sieve. I don't whether pumpkins weren't as hady or sieves were made of sterner stuff back in the day, but mine certainly didn't look up to the task.

Next all there is to do is turn the mush into a kind of custard mix.

To do this mix the cream, sugar and pumpkin together. Flavour with spices (the original recipe had nutmeg and cinnamon, but cardamom is my current favourite), then stir in two egg yolks. I forgot the sugar at this stage and then went out to the pub whilst it baked.

Rosa astutely recognised something was up and put some sugar on top and tok my mini flame thrower to it. That's why it looks a bit like creme brulee in this final picture: