WAIT! Don’t throw those pumpkins away! This fall we have been making an effort to try some new seasonal recipes as you may have noticed, and this has got to be the pinnacle of that. What is more fall than pumpkin! This is similar to an Alfredo sauce with pumpkin as the main ingredient with the help of cheeses and cream.
Hey come look at this, I want to show you something
We received a small pumpkin from our CSA and though it was a nice decoration, I asked it to come and look at something behind the shed with me and it has not been seen since…..
- No I have not seen him officer. I will keep an eye out though.
After peeling the pumpkin and taking out all of the seeds. I chopped all of the flesh, as you can see above and it came out to be this much…
I got some general ideas from some other recipes and I decided to just use as all of the pumpkin that I had and base everything else around that. The first step was sauteing the pumpkin with 3 chopped onions. I started them at the same time, but in the future I would give the pumpkin a 5-10 minute head start. Maybe it is because I used a little pumpkin but the flesh was rock hard and even hard to peel and cut at first. It really took quite a while to soften up.
- After about 40 minutes
Then I added chopped asiago that we got from our CSA which was about 5oz and stirred until it was mostly melted. I also added about 3/4 cup of grated parmesan.
Then I added the dairy which was a combination of what we had, about 1/2 cup of heavy cream and 1/2 cup of half and half. I continued to stir it all until it was well mixed then used the immersion blender to puree everything into a nice and smooth mixture.
While blending, I kept adding spoonfuls of the pasta water to thin and smooth the mixture out and ended up adding about a cup or more of water. Use your discretion for the consistency that you are looking for. I probably could have added even more water and thinned the sauce a bit more. In the meantime, I quickly sauteed the shrimp with some salt and pepper and then assembled with some basil garnish.
This was the original picture that I took for the post, and then dressed it up for my personal pigout. That picture(which is supposed to be strictly between me and my overcheesed pasta) ended up looking even more appetizing we thought and used that as the headliner.
Don’t just throw those pumpkins away! I did not write up a recipe because I was sort of freestyling as I went originally basing it on using all of the pumpkin that I had. The approximate measurements are 1 1/2 cups of cheese, 1 -1 1/2 cups of dairy, 1 cup of pasta water, 2-3 onions, 1 tbsp black pepper, 1 tsp salt
G
Starving Kitten 