Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good

A few days ago, while pondering just what to make with fifteen pumpkins from my garden, I happened to turn the radio on and on NPR was a food program where they were talking about this stuffed pumpkin recipe.  They did a quick listing of ingredients - bread, cheese, bacon, herbs and such - and everything they were stuffing in there sounded pretty tasty!  So I decided to give it a shot.

I picked out the nicest looking pumpkin in the bunch and laid it out with the other ingredients.

The panda of course, was not included in the mix.  Next up was to gut the squash as if preparing to carve a Jack-o-Lantern.  Except I was a LOT more thorough getting all the little stringies out.

I'm saving the seeds for this pumpkin to plant next year.  It was a pretty decent taste, size, shape, etc. etc. etc.

Now mix up the bread, bacon, cheese and spices.  In our case we used a loaf of asiago cheese bread, cojack cheese and crispy bacon leftover from our pumpkin pancake and bacon breakfast.  (Our arteries really took a beating today)  Salt and pepper coated the inside of the pumpkin, then it was time to stuff.

This was the Boyo's favorite part.  Although we had extra stuffing, he did his best to get it all in there.  Once it was pretty well packed in, and I had assured the Boyo that we would cook up the rest of the stuffing so it would not go to waste, we added the heavy cream.  The recipe called for 1/3 cup, but I think we put in a full half cup.  

Lid back in place and onto a pizza tray, then in the oven at 350 degrees for two hours.

And out came our finished stuffed pumpkin!  I took the lid off at about 90 minutes to brown the stuffing a bit.  That's also when I put in the dish of extra stuffing.

 I think that it could have been in there for another half hour or so without trouble.  Although it was pretty tender, and I could poke a fork in the side with ease as the directions said.  It still could have been a little more done.  But the directions also said I could just mix the whole thing together, which I did!

This makes it into sort of a casserole, and is still very tasty!  The kiddos ate it and seemed to like it.

So there you go!    I think it would be really fun to do a turkey and have this as a side dish.  It would be very unique at the table!

More Later