Baked Pumpkin

It’s fall of the year and there are pumpkins aplenty!  Just look around.  There are pumpkin patches everywhere.  And I just had to have a few.  A nice jack-o-lantern.  Some toasted pumpkin seeds.  And fresh baked pumpkin for holiday pies and breads.

The usual way to cook a pumpkin is to cut it up, clean it up, and cook it up in the oven.  But this year I decided to try baking the pumpkin in the solar oven.  Since I wanted to bake it whole, it would not fit into the SOS.  So instead, I used the Cookit.  I placed the pumpkin into a pan, and put it into a clear garbage bag, and twisted the top shut.  The pumpkin was about the size of a basketball, and the garbage bag was just barely big enough.

We set out the Cookit with the bagged pumpkin early in the morning, around 9:00 a.m.  and let it cook all day.  We, of course, turned the oven several times to realign with the sun.  At the end of the day, around 4:00 p.m., the sun was dipping behind our tree so we brought the pumpkin inside.  At first, we thought maybe it wasn’t done.  There was quite a bit of condensation on the inside of the bag and the pumpkin still felt firm.  However, to our surprise, the pumpkin had actually cooked all the way through.  We cut off the top, cut it in half, and pulled out the seeds and string.  The skin very easily peeled off of the cooked pumpkin “meat”.   The pumpkin was extremely soft and was very easily mashed.  Just perfect to use in pies and breads.  This is the easiest way I have ever found to bake a pumpkin.