Hi! Warm welcome to legourmet.tv. Today, we're going to make Pumpkin Pie, my favorite breakfast pie and what you see here in front of me is not a pumpkin but in fact, a butternut squash and I think that this gives a superior flavor to pumpkin pie. I leave the pumpkin out completely and in fact, I met a pumpkin farmer a couple of years ago, who supplied the big canning factories that make the pre-canned pumpkin pie filling that you buy in the super-market. And he told me that 20% of the pumpkins that he sent to the factory had to be the butternuts. The canning factory knew that this was superior but over 20%, they couldn't call, what was in the can, pumpkin pie filling, but under 20%, it gave just enough flavor to make it really fantastic.

So, first up is you clean the squash and then you cook it in the oven. So let's get down to cleaning. Cut it in half, pretty simple operation. Look at the flesh on this, absolutely incredible color. All you need to do at this point is just clean out the seeds. At this point, what I like to do is just kind of make some scores in the flesh, just up here at the end where the flesh is solid. It just helps it cook a little bit more evenly and also you can add a little bit of flavor in there. Something I like to put in is a little bit of maple syrup. Started off just a little bit sweet, little bit in the bottom, and then best tool in the kitchen is your hand, just kind of rub it all over.

So, what we do now is, I just put this in a glass baking dish, both halves right in. I put in just a little bit of water. You don't want to put too much in because they're not a very dry squash; they're actually a really moist squash. So, cover this over with a little tin foil and I cook them in the oven for about half an hour at 350 degrees. That just gets the flesh to the point where you can scoop it out and mash it up for the next step of making pie.

Great! So I've now got everything assembled for our filling, right out here in front of us. So, we need two cups of squash, after it was cooked and it was just kind of soft, I scooped it all out and both half of that squash gave me the two cups that I needed. The other half I put in the container and I'll freeze that, so that I can make a pie later on. So, we take our squash into a big enough bowl. Don't get part way through the recipe and realize that your bowl is not big enough. Little bit of brown sugar and remember, click the link below, if you want to get the full recipe. I'm not going to give you all the amounts right now. Click the link, new page opens up, everything is there. You can watch and you can read along at the same time.

So, some salt, cinnamon, ground cinnamon, ground ginger and some ground nutmeg, all of that goes in and just mix it around with the squash.