Halloween's Pumpkin made into Pie
I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving and you are surviving the inevitable and incessant 'SALE! SALE! SALE!' of the next few weeks. Well, no worries, you're safe here, we're not selling anything, not even bunnies. We're trying not to buy anything, either - well, not much of anything and most of anything we're planning on buying is bunny and people food. It is a season to be grateful, though. We're grateful for friends and fuzzy bunnies and wish everyone else much joy and happiness as well. If we could, we'd send you bunny hugs through the computer screen.
It is also the season of leftover Halloween pumpkins. The shop in town where Hula Bunny yarn is sold, Honokaa Treasures, used three nice pumpkins as window decoration and didn't cut them up for Jack-O-lanterns. At the end of October when the window changed to Thanksgiving instead of Halloween, the pumpkins weren't used again. Although, had I been doing the window I would have been tempted to use them, they are a very bright orange and festive and 'harvest-ish', however, I think maybe pumpkins are becoming too associated with Halloween to make a proper transition to Thanksgiving as store window decoration. Either that or they were too big to fit with the rest of the decorations, or they just tired of looking at them? In any case, all three of the leftover Halloween pumpkins followed me home. So! What to do with Halloween's pumpkins?
I suppose they could just be fed to bunnies, although I've not looked up if bunnies can eat pumpkin but it is a squash so most likely. If anything pumpkin would be too wet to be a good bunny feed, but it'd probably be a good bunny snack. Okay, Google to the Rescue! (what DID we do before the internet?) - well according to the internet (and therefore it must be true, eh?) Bunnies CAN eat pumpkin. Yay! The folks writing things on internet sites generally mention that bunnies should only eat the pumpkin in small amounts. Considering rabbits eating new and different foods, "in small amounts" is always a good bet. So, I could just cut these pumpkins up and feed the bunnies.
Fortunately, there's always Thanksgiving Dinner as an answer of what to do with excess pumpkins type of problem. This year on our guest list was a vegetarian and someone sensitive to wheat and diary and someone who is avoiding sugars. With a pumpkin, the vegetarian part is easy but no wheat and no dairy as well as the no sugars? So, pumpkin pie with no crust? No milk and no butter? No sugar? Well, time for kitchen experiments, I guess. One pumpkin was cut up, the lower half saved for the pie shell and the upper half steamed until it was soft. When it had cooled off, the rind was cut off the chunks and those were mashed up. Pumpkin pie spices were added: cinnamon, a touch of cloves, allspice and nutmeg. It was still a grainy consistency, so it were put into the blender to smooth it out. It was too thick to put into the blender, so some coconut milk was added so it would actually blend. Then, some plain gelatin was added to the rest of the coconut milk to soften and then hot coconut milk mixed into that. A half cup of gelatin was used, I think a third of a cup or even a quarter cup would have worked. We ended up with some pretty firm pie. Anyway, then the gelatin mixture was poured into the steamed pumpkin bottom and it was set into the refrigerator to cool and set.
It turned out pretty good. Next time, a little less gelatin will be used and probably a little less of the pumpkin to make the shell since it was a pretty deep pie slice. We didn't eat the pie shell even though it was steamed, it was still more solid than one would prefer one's pumpkin. I suppose, the whole pumpkin could be pureed and then it could be poured into either a prepared pie crust or into a plain dish with no crust at all. Although, even though there's no crust, there's still quite a few calories from the coconut milk so it's still not a low calorie recipe. Switching out the coconut milk for condensed milk or cream will lower the calories but we were constrained by the 'no dairy' requirement. Also a good slug of blackstrap molasses would improve it rather a lot.
Score the pumpkin in a level line. I used a knife blade placed flat on top of a soda can and then spun the pumpkin to score it. The lower half will be the pumpkin pie 'crust' so level is good. The pie had been sitting in the serving dish at the time, too, to make sure it was level there when it was cut. A festive option would be to make a rick-rack edge, but an overall level edge no matter how it's cut. Cut the pumpkin in half following the line. Scrape out the seeds, cut the upper half into chunks. place into a large steamer and cook until the pumpkin flesh is soft. Put the lower half of the pumpkin into the top of the steamer so it won't be as soft as the rest. It didn't quite fit in our steamer so it was used as the pan lid, which worked surprisingly well. Once it's cooled, cut the rinds off the pumpkin pieces and scrape the flesh from the bottom half of the pumpkin leaving about a half inch on the rind.
Mix the spices together and dust over the pumpkin pieces. Add in the molasses. Mash together. Either put them in a blender or food processor. Add enough coconut milk to get it to process. Puree until it's smooth.
Split the remaining coconut milk into two parts. We only used about half a can to get it to puree, so we had half a can left to use. If you don't have that much left to use, then soften the gelatin powder in the remaining coconut milk and have a half cup of boiling water to pour over the softened gelatin. We'd heated half of the remaining coconut milk in the microwave so it would be hot to pour over the 'softened' gelatin. In any case, read the instructions on the can of gelatin and revise this recipe to suit. For our pie, the gelatin tried setting pretty quickly, probably because we didn't have as much liquid as they probably expected. The 'softening' time was less then a minute in our case, but it seemed to have worked fine.
So, anyway, soften the gelatin powder, add in the hot liquid, stir then quickly add the gelatin mix to the pumpkin puree and mix together well. Pour that gelatin/pumpkin puree mixture into the half pumpkin shell and put into the refrigerator to chill. Serve with whipped cream topping. We just got lazy and used Coolwhip. Other than having to cut up and steam a pumpkin, it is a pretty easy recipe since it doesn't have to be baked. The oven gets pretty full during Thanksgiving so anything that doesn't have to be baked is always a plus in my book. I'm guessing you could use a can of pumpkin puree and set it with the gelatin and pour into a jello mold and get the same result. Hmm, maybe a festive pumpkin shaped jello mold? Are there any out there?
Generally, we don't groom the young bunnies until they get to be about three months old so we are able to evaluate how they grow their wool. If it's a coat that is prone to matting, we usually move the bunnies off to a home where they will be the only bunny so there will be more bunny grooming time for the individual bunny. If we were going by that general rule, then Ziggy would be looking for a new home. However, her wool texture is really lovely, so we will keep her here instead of letting her go to a new home. She's also the only one of the new girls who isn't related to Zeus. When she's older, a pairing between her and Zeus will be the first breeding we will be able to have happen that will be between bunnies that have been on an organic diet their whole life. Just sort of as a test to see if the alfalfa harvested with herbicide to 'ripen' the fields evenly has a permanent effect on rabbit fertility.
She cleaned up pretty well. Even though her coat was a mess and clumpy, the clumps came off pretty easily. Had she not been groomed, she probably would have molted them off entirely. The bunnies here are primarily a fiber herd and not a show bunny herd. If we were going to be primarily a show bunny herd, then we'd probably want bunnies that held onto their coats instead of easily molting them off.
Ziggy also has excellent ears. Held upright and tight, so far I think she has the best ears in the herd. Not, of course, that ear carriage has anything to do with fiber quality, but if/when she goes to a show, she'd get an extra point or two for having nice ears.
Gayle wasn't too messy between groomings, although she'd had a bit of her coat harvested earlier. She's cleaned up and tidy now but didn't have any big mats, which is what we like to see.
All finished with grooming and she still has some wool left on her. This being winter and all, I like plucking the coat instead of shearing if possible. Not that Hawaii has that much difference in temperature during the year, but they're pretty small little critters so it may be harder for them to maintain body warmth. Leaving them some fluff during the cooler parts of the year just seems like a good idea and they seem to appreciate it.
As you can see, she's molting one coat and has the other half grown in. Very uneven coat at the moment, but she's not on a show table so it's all good. Her ears are also semi 'lazy' so that's not good on a show table, either. Fortunately, there's no bunny shows around here for awhile. She does have good fiber texture even though we didn't get a very large harvest from this grooming. I suppose I should start keeping better records of how often they are groomed and/or harvested and how much wool was produced.
Both Ziggy and Gayle were good at their groomings and neither one had wool or ear mites. Ziggy was especially patient and hardly moved at all. I think she almost fell asleep at one point. They've been bred for temperament as well as wool quality.
It's really useful to have a database of all things bunny. We use Kintracks here at Hillside Farm Hawaii and it's one of the most useful tools we have for bunny breeding.
Kintracks Free Download
If you're running an older computer, it's a free program. You can download and put in quite a few animals before you have to pay to get the full program and even paid for, it's not that expensive. I forget exactly how much we paid back in 2009 for it, but it was around $16. A seriously good value! So, anyway, since we have the database on all things bunny, I've been able to easily go back and check various things.
I looked up how many times each buck had been mated and how many litters arrived from those matings. It was really interesting to see that there was a huge difference in fertility between bucks. The best one was City Slicker at 83%. I'll make a list.
So perhaps our lack of litters has more to do with the specific bucks more so than the feed?
This is just the raw data, I need to sort and chew on it a bit. I'm thinking we will increase the number of bucks we keep around and keep them longer before moving them to new homes. That will give us a chance to see how many of the litters show up when they're used for mating. Fertility hasn't been one of the criteria for choosing which bucks to keep, I think we're gonna start paying attention to that. When we get back from vacation, I think a new buck hutch will need to be built.
