Four Days of Pumpkin, 31 August 2013

Today I realized why I can't lose five pounds, and I knowingly gave my entire family a case of bad gas, which all comes from a desire to be efficient and from the wishful thinking that it were already autumn and not 90 degrees F.

You see, four days ago I opened a 30-oz can of pumpkin.

No really, stay with me here.  Jay found a large beef top loin roast on markdown at the grocery store which had to be cooked by Tuesday.  So Tuesday morning I found a safe-looking slow-cooker recipe, threw the thing in the pot, and forgot about it.  (Actually, neither of those statements is true.  The particular recipe I used had quite a few different steps, and forgetting about it wasn't possible because the meaty aroma spread through the whole house.)  As dinnertime approached, I couldn't help thinking that a hearty autumn-like dinner would be perfectly complimented by some spicy pumpkin muffins.

At which time I opened the smallest can of pumpkin in my pantry, which amounted to the aforementioned 30 ounces (3 cups; 850 grams).  To lend some perspective to my non-baker friends, an entire pumpkin pie only uses half that amount, and a batch of muffins naturally uses much less than a pie.  Using about one-third of the pumpkin, I got my spiced muffin fix (which made for a great snack while home alone the next day), which left the rest of the can plus the milk left over.  Loathe to throw it out, I stuck them in containers and bunged them into the frig.

Of course, you see where this leaves us.  Over the next few days, I had to prepare recipes that used the rest of the pumpkin!  Did it occur to me to make some sort of sage-y dressing and go all gourmet on a chicken, or to stir up a savory pumpkin risotto?  Of course not!  Pumpkin is for desserts (okay, and for the rare soup--very rare soup).

On Thursday we had a quintessential summertime meal: Corn-on-the-cob, fresh carrot sticks, melon, and Rollkuchen (I'll do a blog post about the fritters and other Mennonite recipes another time).  Not having had much protein in the meal, I made pumpkin cream cheese bars for dessert.  Get it?  Cream cheese = protein.  Duh.

Today, I gathered some bounty from our garden and made a beautiful main-dish salad, beefed-up--so to speak--with dry salami and grated mozzarella cheese, topped with a nice little oil vinaigrette.  Technically-speaking, this salad completed all our remaining nutritional needs for the day.

So darn pretty! I love picking things that aren't weeds from my garden.

But technically, I still had leftover pumpkin and evaporated milk, which were reaching the end of their refrigerator shelf-life.  In the name of waste-not-want-not, as soon as my second bowl of salad was eaten, I began the search for the perfect recipe to use up the last bits of that large pumpkin can, opened four days earlier.

Did you know that if you do a Google search for "cup pumpkin," the first hits will be from other bloggers who collected recipes simply for the purpose of using up leftover canned pumpkin?  I am not the only one who has experienced this dilemma!

And then I found it.  The perfect recipe to solve all my pumpkin problems: Pumpkin Cheesecake Milkshake.  Oh yes.

Oh no.

Does anyone know if using no-sugar added vanilla ice cream cancels out the calories in a block of cream cheese?  Anyone?  Well that was my strategy, even while knowing sugar alcohol was going to do a number on the hapless members of my family.

However hapless we were, after one sip of that milkshake we were happy.  Oh.  So.  Happy.

But we weren't happy enough to stop guzzling after just one sip, of course.

And that, my friends, is the story of why I can't lose five pounds and why I feel badly for the people who will be sitting in the pew next to us during church tomorrow.  At least I didn't waste any pumpkin in the process!