PUMPKIN HALWA

PUMPKIN HALWA

#Edited- This post was featured as the best post at " Friday Free for all" on 6th November 2015. This can be viewed at Friday free for all link.

# Edited:- This post was featured as the best post for Real Food Friday, this can be viewed at Real Food Friday blog hop on 5th November 2015. 

Happy Halloween to all those celebrating.

When I was in Kenya, I lived with my husband in a remote area for one year, where there was only one big secondary school; it was a boarding school with hostels, a few residential settlements, a few shops and a post office outside the school. This boarding school had a population of around 500 plus students. There were teachers’ houses within that boarding school. We lived in a big house with a big kitchen garden at the back. To get Indian vegetables and grocery, we had to travel to 60 km far to a city of Kisumu.

In that kitchen garden, we had some fruit trees like banana and pawpaw (papaya) and many other tall trees which were found in that region. Kenya is a green country, in that climate, we get a lot of sunlight and rain throughout the year, which is suitable for the growth of so many agricultural products. Few papaya trees (4-5) in my kitchen garden, were very tall like coconut trees, maybe 15-20 feet tall. So the big problem was to get the fruits from those tall trees. I assume they were so tall because they must have been very old.

Many times, during school holidays or sometimes during weekends some young boys from the nearby villages, used to come and ask for piece jobs in the garden. And I used to give them the job to climb those trees to get fresh ripe and raw papaya; those boys were really expert climbers. They would help bring down baskets and baskets of papaya, some raw, some about to ripe, and some ready to eat, and that means a lot of papayas. Then the next job was to distribute those papayas to friends in surrounding areas before they got rotten because surely I couldn’t use up all of them. I have tried and tested many recipes with that raw papaya. Raw papaya skin is very hard to peel and inside the flesh is also very hard like that of a pumpkin. Though the inside flesh is white which is unlike of a pumpkin.

So for this pumpkin halwa recipe, I am using the same recipe and method as I used in papaya halwa, except instead of papaya, I’m using pumpkin. When I tried it for the first time, it came out super nice, plus the colour was also very nice and appealing without adding any artificial food colour. The other surprising thing about this recipe has very few ingredients.

This is the season of pumpkins and Halloween here in Canada, and all the shops are filled with many different sizes of pumpkin- from very small to very large. In North America when people celebrate Halloween, a lot of pumpkin carving is done to make jack-o-lanterns and decorate in front of their houses. Even in schools, kids are taught to do pumpkin carving, as my grandson is taking a big pumpkin to school to carve it tomorrow.

RECIPE

INGREDIENTS

• One small pumpkin around 400 grams
• 100 grams sugar (or more to taste)
• 4 tbs ghee (clarified butter) OR unsalted butter.
• 50 grams sliced almonds or any other nuts
• 50 grams raisin (optional)
• ½ tsp cardamom/nutmeg or cinnamon powder

METHOD

• Peel, wash and slice the pumpkin into small pieces, then boil it in a pot, adding the small amount of water at the bottom of the pot. ( I used pressure cooker, which took only 3 minutes after the whistle)
• Mash the pumpkin pieces with the potato masher.
• Heat ghee in a fry pan or wok, when hot, add mashed pumpkin and cook for 5 minutes.
• Add sugar and again cook for some time till the water melting from the sugar disappears, stirring occasionally.
• Add nuts and cardamom powder, and serve hot as a dessert.

I am sending this recipe as my blog post entry for Food Year link up for October and Friday free for all, and with Tasty Tuesday C, kids and with Hearth and soul blog hop and with Cook blog share, and with Wordless Wednesday, and with Credit crunch munch and with Fuss free Helen, and also with Great Idea Thursday,, and with Full plate Thursday, and with Way wow link party, My two favourite thins on Thursday, and with Real Food Friday, and with Fiesta Friday and with Food and Fitness Friday, and with Meatless Monday and with What'd you do this weekend, and with Happy healthy and green, and with Throwback Thursday link up party, and with Tuesday Tutorials,