To ask a really stupid question (a specialty of mine), what are you guys using for pumpkin? I bought a small pumpkin (labeled for cooking as opposed to carving) for the pumpkin orzo I made Saturday night. Between hacking my way in, scooping all the seeds and chipping away with the paring knife to get a few scraps, I ended up with just enough stuff that ultimately didn't taste, well, pumpkiny, but rather like squash. Do you folks use the canned pumpkin puree or did I do something particularly dim?

The SS WF has sugar pumpkins on the shelves right now, though I haven't tried any recently. They've worked beautifully in the past.

I grew some of my own pumpkins this summer and I also grew yellow squash right next to them. I just cooked my first one yesterday and it also tasted like squash. The original theory we floated was that the squash and pumpkins had cross-polinated resulting in a light flesh, not so sweet pumpkin (it actually cooked up somewhat opaque, like squash).

Give the farmer's market a try this weekend. I'm sure their product is far superior to anything on the shelves.

Pumpkin, as I'm sure you know, is a type of winter squash. Pumpkin flesh is often watery and bland. It is sometimes necessary to puree cooked pumpkin and then cook it on top of the stove to drive out some of the water and concentrate the flavor before making a pie with fresh pumpkin, even the sugar pie varietal. For more intense flavor and denser flesh, use butternut squash or kabocha (buttercup) squash. They are interchangeable with pumpkin in any recipe calling for pumpkin (ie. pie, risotto, stew), and have better flavor, as a rule. This, of course, is IMHO and YMMV.

Thank you for this info, but I'm still a little confused (please see dimness outlined above). Is reducing, reducing, reducing cooked pumpkin the only way to get that pumpkin flavor I love or am I confusing the flavor with the spices usually added to the pumpkin?

Seems like a bit of mind reading is required here. Do you mean pumpkin pie spice--usually a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and clove? Have you had a savory pumpkin dish before? Those "sweet spices" are not usually included. A quick, relatively inexpensive way of answering your own question would be to buy two cans of pumpkin--one plain, and one pumpkin pie filling, which includes the pie spices. Taste them side by side. then you'll know.