For Pie Or Not For Pie

Pumpkins, pumpkins, everywhere you look now there are pumpkins. Whether you use them for fall decorating, or to ward off spooky creatures in celebration of Halloween, there seems to be an abundance of pumpkins to choose from this year. If you’re like me, you may have wondered with all the pumpkin carving over the years if Jack-O-Lantern type pumpkins can also be used to make pumpkin pie. The answer would be yes, they can. Any pumpkin can actually be used to make pie. Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins’ texture is different from pumpkins raised strictly as pie pumpkins, but it can still be done. Word of warning though, you do not want to use a pumpkin that has been carved and setting out for several hours as pumpkin pie material; you don’t even want to know the amount of bacteria and mold that would have started to set in by that time. Since I have now given you an early Halloween scare, I’ll make this suggestion - save the carving pumpkins for carving, and buy the smaller, sweeter pie pumpkins for baking. Remember though, there is an eating treat that carving pumpkins can supply, and that’s plenty of seeds for roasting.