Once you
have located your victim, you need to sneak up on the little orange critter. You might find it setting silently on your front porch or sidewalk, or even on a hay bale out in the yard. Reach out and grasp it firmly around its middle, pick it up and run into your kitchen before it escapes! Now grab hold of the biggest knife you can find, the kind that Psycho made famous. The first cut is the hardest, and it might fight you on this one, but you need to stab the pumpkin about an inch away from the stem, and slice it all around the circumference of this stem. This disables the pumpkin so he won't roll away.The hard part comes next because he might fight you still. You need to cut it in half, laying both halves out so you can gut it. This can get bloody. Those stringies and seeds just stick to everything when you scrape them out. I recommend a big bowl set aside to put the guts in, so you can decide later whether to dry the seeds in your oven or throw them out. The birds love dried pumpkin seeds by the way, and they are a big hit mixed with the sunflower seeds in your backyard bird feeder.
Next you preheat your oven to 325 degrees and invert the two cleaned-out halves onto a cookie sheet, and you are ready to bake it. If you have a pumpkin bigger than your cookie sheet, you can cut it into 3 or 4 big pieces, making sure that the skin is showing outside. Bake at 325 degrees, for ONE hour. You can start to smell the delicious fragrance of that pumpkin all over the house while it bakes. When you have removed it from the oven, you will notice that the bright orange has faded to a dark brown, normal markings for the species.
Finally, after you let the halves cool down sufficiently to begin the actual butchering process of this meat, you scoop out the flesh, all the way down to the inside of the skin, putting it into a large bowl.
Your average pumpkin, sized about 12-14 inches in diameter, should yield about 6 -7 cups of shredded meat. I puree it in my food processor, and then pack it in freezer cartons, measuring out one or two inch cups for future recipes.
Finally to those pumpkin seeds....I wash the stringies off the seeds, and this can get messy, and then dry the seeds spread out on parchment paper, on a big cookie sheet, at 225 degrees for 20 or 30 minutes. I stir them about every 5 minutes or so, and you can tell when they are starting to dry completely. If you are saving them for a human treat, you can sprinkle some salt on the seeds before drying, and then after drying, add sugar and spices as you desire. Otherwise, let them cool down and mix them into your bird feeder.
Happy Hunting!
