Super Foods -> Pumpkin

“Pumpkin?” people ask “Why pumpkin?” Most people find pumpkin the dark horse of the SuperFoods. Many of us rarely think of pumpkin as a food. We buy a pumpkin to carve at Halloween when it serves as a glorified candleholder that’s disposed of once the trick or treaters go home. We only eat it once a year, if at all, in a Thanksgiving pie. Most people think of pumpkin as a decorative gourd rather than a highly nutritious and desirable food.

This is unfortunate because the squash known as pumpkin is one of the most nutritionally valuable foods known to man. (By the way, pumpkin is not a vegetable; it’s a fruit. Like melons, it’s a member of the gourd family.) Moreover, it’s inexpensive, available year round in canned form, incredibly easy to incorporate into recipes, high in fiber, and low in calories. All in all, pumpkin is a real nutrition superstar.

It’s all very well that pumpkin is such a nutritional powerhouse, but that doesn’t count for much if every time you wanted some pumpkin you had to wrestle one of those big orange gourds into the kitchen. A winter squash, pumpkin is usually available fresh only in the autumn and early winter and the rest of the year you might have trouble finding one. But one of the best features of pumpkin is that it’s readily available all year long in an inexpensive canned form. At our house, my wife Patty’s pumpkin pudding is always on hand. Our kids all love it and their visiting friends, who are sometimes skeptical of “healthy” foods, dig right in when we serve it.

Canned pumpkin is one of those foods that give the lie to the notion that fresh is always best. Not only is it sometimes difficult if not impossible to find fresh pumpkin, canned pumpkin is actually more nutritious. Canned pumpkin puree (don’t get it mixed up with “pumpkin pie filling,” which has added sugar and spices), has been cooked down to reduce the water content that you’d find Squash that comes from a cooler climate will often have more flavor and sweetness than one that grows in a warmer place. Check your supplier.