It’s fun to splurge every once in a while. I couldn’t be bothered with most splurges. Clothes . . . I never really know what is in style anyway. Something for the home . . . I have enough clutter as it is. But food, food is my weakness. I’m all about the holiday treats which is why I’ve been making far too many trips to Trader Joe’s lately. You see, I discovered their pumpkin butter and I’ve been putting it on everything from pancakes to toast.

The problem is, I have 4 kids and they can knock out a jar of pumpkin butter in a sitting. That get’s expensive. The solution of course, was to make my own.

I thought of Meagan of The Happiest Home, who had experimented with making her own Lemon Curd (another one of my Trader Joe’s weaknesses) and decided that pumpkin butter had to be easier than that.

I looked at the ingredients on the back of my pumpkin butter jar. Pumpkin, lemon juice, spices. They looked easy enough. After playing around with proportions for a bit this is what I’ve come up with. The result is delicious and we get twice as much pumpkin butter for half the cost — that means I can stick it on more stuff!

Ingredients

• 1 can of pumpkin (29 ounces)
• 3/4 cup of apple or lemon juice
• 1 cup of sugar or honey
• 1 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Preparation

This really is about as easy as it gets. Combine everything in a saucepan. Stir it up. Bring it to a boil. Reduce heat then simmer for half an hour or until it becomes thick and smooth. Stir this frequently as it simmers. This mixture will spit at you a bit so be careful!

Chill then serve on anything you want! This will keep in the fridge for several weeks . . . although I highly doubt it will last that long.

This is delicious on pancakes, toast, dipping apples in  . . . the possibilities are endless. I’ve even heard moms who have kids with peanut allergies that this makes delicious pumpkin sandwiches!

Is anyone a canning expert? We love this so much that I want to make a huge batch and can it but to be honest . . . I’m afraid I’m going to food poison everyone? Does anyone know what the process is for canning pumpkin butter? In the meantime, I’ll probably just freeze some but I love the idea of canning a bunch of this at once.