high time for pie

There's only so much job searching you can do. And while gaining employment is pretty much number one on my priority list right now, there are way more hours in the day than there are job sites and resources. So sometimes it's necessary to find other things to add to that to do list.Such as, buy some pie pumpkins and try to make a pie. Seasonal-appropriate but maybe not the easiest way to fill a couple of the morning hours. Exactly what I was looking for in a project.

First step, buy some pie pumpkins. Not only does finding them in the neighborhood take time, but prepping them is also way more labor intensive than opening a can. Plus, this makes for a much better pie.

Clean it.

Cut it.

Gut it. This was a lot easier than carving a normal pumpkin. Used an ice cream scoop, it took about 30 seconds.

According to the internet there are a lot of different ways to get the parts you want to make a pie out of ready, but microwaving it for 15 minutes just sounds gross to me. Today I steamed mine, cutting the halves again and putting them over a steamer tray for about 25 minutes.

After they came out of the pot, the guts were soft enough to slide right off the skin and into the food processor. This was about when the dog started to realize I was messing with food, even though it didn't smell too edible and it wasn't like I was going to offer her some steamed pumpkin guts.

Hopefully it's alright if things are still a little stringy. Not having had the pie yet I have to admit I don't know. That was another plus for the project though; not knowing how to do something like this makes me flex some different muscles and plus, my mom made the best pies ever when I was a kid and I'd love to be able to make them myself. On that front, I didn't want to mush things up too much, b/c the pies I had as a kid always had some chunks of pumpkin in the pie that soak up spice and really give the pie good texture.

Into the mixer with all the spices, eggs, and sugar. This looked way runnier than I expected but seems to have baked up well. Surprisingly (again, and this is why I don't really bake) there was a lot of mix left over after filling the crust up too. Again, I just kind of shrugged and threw it in the oven.

Before

After

Judging by the after, things might have worked out pretty well. The good thing about spending a morning like this, on top of hopefully having a delicious pie, is that all the baking gave me plenty of time to do the usual morning job searches and send some apps out. Now I just have to keep trying to forget another awful weekend of football. Outstanding.

Current beer-scale: 4.9