DuPont left a comment on my previous post.  Yes, my dear 10 readers, DuPont.  My political leanings aside, I published the comment so you can read that DuPont (the maker of Teflon) thinks that Teflon is perfectly safe.  They even have a link to more information.  As a further balancing opinion, here’s a brief snippet from the EPA about PFOA (Teflon includes this chemical, also known a C8).  Oh, and here’s an interesting point from that page:

“EPA is taking action to help minimize the potential impact of PFOA on the environment. In January 2006, former EPA Administrator Johnson’s letter initiated the 2010/15 PFOA Stewardship Program, in which the eight major companies in the industry (including DuPont) committed voluntarily to reduce facility emissions and product content of PFOA and related chemicals on a global basis by 95 percent no later than 2010, and to work toward eliminating emissions and product content of these chemicals by 2015.”

I’ll let you make of those facts what you will.  My own interpretation is that if it is perfectly safe, why is the EPA concerned and why would DuPont voluntarily remove it from the market?  Of course, everyone who knows me knows that I am a hippie who wants to own a treadle-powered sewing machine in order to use less electricity and be able to make my own clothing from vintage fabrics.  So I’m sure you’re not surprised that neither Wal-Mart nor DuPont top my list of favorite companies.

My real purpose in posting today is to tell you my hard-earned tip about cooking pumpkin soup in a pumpkin.  Say you find a recipe online that tells you to cook soup in a pumpkin to wow your friends.  Say they tell you to simply scrape the sides of the pumpkin while it’s cooking to get that delicious pumpkin flavor into the soup.  Don’t believe them.  There is no way you’re going to get enough pumpkin flavor  into your soup that way.  My tip?  Add at least 2 cups of pumpkin puree to the soup independent of the shell.  Really, cooking your soup in a pumpkin is a way to make it fancy, not a way to add flavor.  I’ve tried at least twice now to make the scraping method work for me and it flops every time.  This time, I tried with black bean pumpkin soup.  It tasted like a nice black bean soup.  But not very pumpkin-y.

Now, how do you make your own pumpkin puree?
1.  Buy a neck pumpkin or two.  My initial mistake was trying to use a jack-o-lantern type pumpkin (so much wasted effort!). I think we get about 4 c. of puree from one neck pumpkin.
2.  Peel the neck pumpkins.  Cut them into thick 1-2″ slices, removing the seeds and cutting off the stem ends.
3.  Cook the slices in a 350 degree oven until they’re soft in the center when you stick a fork in them (1/2 hour?  45 minutes?).
4.  Puree the cooked slices in your blender, adding a little bit of water if necessary.  Freezing the puree in a tupperware container works perfectly well.