The Great Pumpkin Overload Post Part 2: Pumpkin Pie!

All right remember back in Part 1, where I was talking about how great it was working in a restaurant because I can often take home spices when I need them. (I'm not going to lie that is pretty nice) Well, as I was asking one of our chefs for the spices he misunderstood that I just wanted to make pumpkin pie spice and not that I was making pumpkin pies.

At first I just laughed it off. Because really, I hadn't even thought about making pies. It just seemed like something I wasn't ready for. But the more I researched it and the more I thought about it. The more I realized that I could handle it. The only trick was to find the right pumpkins. And as luck would have it, Target started selling pie pumpkins right after halloween. 

And so I knew, I had no choice, but to make some pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving!.

The Recipe

Cooking pumpkins in a slow cooker from One Good Thing by Jillee

Pumpkin pie recipe from Frontier Natural Products Co-op's infographic used below

Results

All right first step is to clean and cook the pumpkins.  

Which is a lot easier said than done. Pumpkins are thick and hard to cut through. But after I got the stem out, I found it was easy to cut it in half. And to get the seeds out I used a big metal slotted spoon. 

And then I set them in my crock pot and let them cook.

(And sure it might be less time to cook them in the over, but I love my crock pot so I use any excuse to use it.)

All right after I cooked the pumpkins (and I waited until the day before Thanksgiving, so my pie wouldn't get eaten before hand), it was time to cook the pies

Lion was more than willing to help. (Or to just see what was happening in the stand mixer and get in my way.)

(And as a side note, I premixed my dry spices the day before and I couldn't help but notice that my pumpkin pie spice looked a whole lot different than the spices actually going into the pumpkin pie.)

I know the sugar lightens it up, but there's still a big difference in the spices that go in. All right side note over)

So by the time I really got mixing everything together, Blue had wondered over to help as well.

Maybe next year, I'll be a little more confident in my skills have Blue help me.

And here's how it actually looked on the inside.

So once it was all mixed, I easily poured it into a 10 inch pie shell

I know the recipe calls for a 9 inch pie shell, but I tried that with my tester pie and I had more filling than the shell would allow. So for my Thanksgiving pie I decided to go a little bigger.

So here's how it turned out.

Its a little dark, but Mike seems to like it better when its burnt. 

And now I can officially say I cooked my own pumpkin pie! (And maybe next year I'll even make my own pie crust!)