Savory and sweet recipes using canned pumpkin puree
Fresh pumpkins are wonderful, but when it comes to recipes that use pureed pumpkin, we usually prefer to skip the mild hassle of carving, cooking and pureeing and pick up the canned stuff instead. (Please note: We are not talking about pumpkin pie filling — we mean 100 percent pumpkin puree, with no added sugar or spices.)
This is not a list of recipes for pumpkin pie, because we don’t want to put canned pumpkin in a corner. (But here’s a personal favorite for all you early Thanksgiving planners.) Instead, here are other ways to cook with the canned squash — as a sauce for pasta, stirred into chili and mixed into a spice cake. These recipes also present good ways to use any leftover pumpkin puree you’re likely to end up with this season.
Pasta With Creamy Pumpkin Sauce, above. The flavors of pumpkin-stuffed ravioli with a butter sage sauce, in quick-to-assemble form. If you were trying to make this vegetarian and/or dairy-free, you could swap the chicken broth for vegetable, use your preferred dairy-free milk and find a vegetarian Parmesan. For something a bit meatier, check out our recipe for Pumpkin Turkey Pasta.
Pumpkin Chicken Chili. We could all use more soup and chili recipes, right? This one is practically wearing a flannel shirt, it’s so perfect for fall: It’s creamy from the pumpkin, gently spiced and very warming.
Creamy Pumpkin Grits With Brown Butter. Grits are treated like risotto here, meaning they’re cooked in a dairy-rich liquid flavored with onions, herbs and pumpkin puree until they’re slightly soupy and extra creamy. A little thyme-infused brown butter gets drizzled over each portion for good measure.
Pumpkin Brown Rice Pudding. Tastes decadent, but it’s a healthful blend of short-grain brown rice, low-fat milk, pumpkin puree and maple syrup, with a slew of warming spices tossed in, too. This requires a little planning ahead — the finished product needs to chill for at least eight hours (or up to four days) before serving.
Pumpkin Spice Cake. We all know this is why you’re really here; you want a recipe for a quick, moist pumpkin-based cake that will make your kitchen smell like decorative gourd season on pumpkin-spice-flavored steroids. Seek no further: This is an updated version of the recipe that ran in The Washington Post in 1936. And — trivia time! — it’s perhaps the first time in print the words “pumpkin” and “spice” were joined in modern and irrevocable harmony.
More from Voraciously:
How to make seasonal, sippable mulled beverages at home
Here are some photos of gigantic pumpkins for no other reason than to distract you from reality
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