This weekend, I finally got round to making a pumpkin pie. I may have done this before, and I’ve eaten one or two in my time, but this is certainly the first one I’ve made for a long while. Pumpkins have been in the stores for a few weeks and, although I don’t think they are of the finest culinary quality (many buy them just to carve up for Halloween displays), they still yield a reasonable edible return for the cost.

Having removed the seeds and roasted the pumpkin (boiling apparently also works), the flesh can be scraped from the skin. The first one I did, used for soup in mid-October, I spend ages cutting the skin off the uncooked fruit but that appears to have been a bit of a waste of time. I put that in my food processor, blitzed it and then proceeded to build the filling – a tin of condensed milk, two eggs and an additional yolk and various spices (salt, ginger, cinnamon and freshly grated nutmeg in this version). Really, it is a sweetened egg custard (eggs and the condensed combination of milk and sugar) extended with pumpkin and spices.

That goes in a prepared pie case – I used pre-made pastry in this case and prebaked it but it shrank a bit more than I expected – and cooked it for about an hour at around 130°C (fan oven). It benefited from a chance to get thoroughly cool, so it is definitely a dish that can be cooked in advance, and from serving up with cream.

I will make it again (possibly soon – I’ve got the flesh of another pumpkin ready to use) but perhaps on a smaller scale. It was delicious but also very rich and I don’t think I need another full pie dish full.