Journeys for Knowledge

No grandiose sweeping themes for this post, simply a brief fun moment from last week I wanted to share. As this year marks my first autumn away from home, I became painfully aware of the absence of a hallmark of the season, pumpkin pie. I was distraught to learn that not only was pumpkin pie not easily obtained at the grocery store, but even the canned pumpkin my mother would use to make her own pie was impossible to find! Unwilling to be thwarted in my task, I bought a small pumpkin and brought it home, determined to find a recipe that would allow me to make it from scratch.

Sure enough I found a recipe that called for raw pumpkin, but it required a long process to turn the solid pumpkin into a useable paste. With the help of a friend I gathered all the supplies, while she collected the spices and cooking implements. Together we spent 2 hours just softening, mashing, and draining the pumpkin before we could even start baking. By midnight we had our first pie, which turned out amazingly well. The next two pies followed shortly after, which even more people enjoyed both that night and the next night when I brought one to the lab. We even had leftover batter to make pumpkin sponge cake, but at the end of the day, we both agreed this was too lengthy of a process to repeat any time soon. I suppose if I were to summarize this story succinctly, I had my pie and ate it too.