The Great Pumpkin Slaughter

I have always cooked up Neck Pumpkins for my pumpkin baking. They are fantastic and one neck pumpkin will produce enough pumpkin for about 4 pies or 3 pies and a batch of Pumpkin Chip Muffins. But here in GA I can't find neck pumpkins. No one even has heard of them here.

So I bought another kind of pumpkin that a saleslady recommended. Don't ask me what kind it is. I only know that it was the hardest thing I've ever tried to cut open.

I started with this knife I got at Sam's last year that will cut ANYTHING. Wood, tomatoes, meat...anything. But it wouldn't even penetrate the pumpkin.

Knife #2 was much larger, but that wouldn't work, either.

Knife #3 was smaller but was a filet knife with an extremely sharp point. Surely this one I could wield like a folcrum, stabbing it with the tip. Nope.

Move on to knife #4. A steak knife. I figure if the other blades didn't work, maybe if I sawed the pumpkin with a sereated (is that spelled right?) edge it would work.

For pete's sake! By this time I think that someone sold me a rock painted like a pumpkin. I was at least a half hour into this act of cutting open the pumpkin and was no further along and getting terribly worn out.

I pulled out Knife #5. This one is like a meat cleaver or a small machete. I positioned the pumpkin on the counter so that it was still, raised the cleaver up over my head with both hands on the handle and brought it down as hard as I could.

I got the knife in! But only about 1 inch and I couldn't get the knife back out. So I raised the knife AND the pumpkin up about 2 feet off the counter and started banging it down onto the counter as hard as I could. I was half afraid I would crack the counter. (No, I don't have granite countertops!) The pumpkin finally split open.

That pumpkin pie had better be good. (I know a can of pumpkin would be a lot easier, but once you've had homemade for years, it's hard to switch back!)

Sorry that I don't have any pictures! If I'd known this would have been such an ordeal I would have had my husband or son video tape the pumpkin masacre for you to watch.