Hope you all had a great holiday.  I’m still recovering from a sugar overdose combined with the after effects of observing Black Friday.

Anyway, I have to share with you my most frugal find of the fall season.  Since you’ve all ridiculously stuffed yourselves with food for the last twenty-four hours I know you’ll be thrilled with my topic…

Pumpkins!

I’m sure this will not be news to some of you, but this was a first for me, so I’m talking about it.

Around the middle of October we bought three pie pumpkins for about six dollars to use as decor around the house.  My girls aren’t interested in carving pumpkins, they just like to set them out and have them look pretty.  So they decorated our tables and shelves for a few weeks.

Then, seeing as how the Christmas decorations would soon be coming out, we decided to cook the pumpkins.

Cleaning them out was a bit messy, but cooking them and turning them into pumpkin puree was super easy.

The cooked pumpkin was so much prettier than the canned stuff (not that  it really matters when you’re eating it, but still…).

I decided to be really cool and roast the seeds as well.

After that we moved on to the fun stuff…

Our favorite Pumpkin Chocolate-Chip Cookies,

yummy pumpkin bread and muffins,

and the object of everyone’s desire…the pumpkin roll.

So, my point in sharing all of this is, for six dollars I got:

• a month of beautiful decor
• a large jar of pumpkin seeds to snack on
• and enough pumpkin puree for : five dozen cookies, six loaves of bread, and the glorious pumpkin roll.

I’d say that was definitely a good use of my money!