How to Cook a Pumpkin

I was helping Mum in the kitchen tonight, and told her about how I needed to come up with a post for JOJ. “You could tell how to cook a pumpkin!” She suggested. I wasn’t so sure about that because—truth be told—I was just learning myself for the first time how to do it!

After she told me that she hadn’t known how to cook a pumpkin until she was living by herself for a while, I felt a little better about it. So…here is how to cook a pumpkin!

First, select your pumpkin. This time, we used a Banana squash, but you could use any kind of pumpkin to do this. Cut it into quarters.

One of the quarters.

After cutting it into quarters, we scooped out the seeds and tried to get most of the strings out. It doesn’t matter if there are some left—you just want to take out the bulk of them.

If you want to, you could stop here and stick them in the oven like this (actually, if you are using something like the Grey pumpkin we can get here you wouldn’t even have to cut it into quarters—cut in half would work fine). If you wanted to do that, place them upside down (with the skin up) in a roaster pan. Bake at 175°C (350°F) for an hour, or until tender and well done.

Pumpkin wedges.

We decided to go further tonight, though, and cut it up into wedges about 1 inch (2 ½ cm) thick. For some of the wedges, we cut the quarters in half lengthwise, but for others we just left them whole.

Finished and delicious!

Toss them into a roasting pan (like a baking sheet with deep sides—if you don’t have one, a baking sheet should work just fine), and bake at 175°C (350°F) for an hour, or until tender and well done. Serve with butter or gravy. Yum!

And that is how you cook a pumpkin. Well, one way anyway…. :)

Have a blessed weekend!
~Esther