My personal favorite book about pumpkins is "The Perfect Pumpkin" by Gail Damerow. That books covers just about anything you could want to know about pumpkins, from history to cultivation to cooking (including unusual things like pumpkin soap and wine). If you have time before your lesson look for that book, I am pretty sure you can get it sent to a Barnes and Nobles or maybe even a library might have it. If time is an issue just say so and I will try to answer your questions when I get back from work.

Thanks for the lead! I've already checked my local library, and they don't have the boo, so Barnes and Noble is my next stop. Yes, I have a bit of time -- September, but I'm kinda slow. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. Someone gave me a recipe for pumpkin latte the other day. See? I'm moving already!

Here is the link on the Barnes and Noble website, so that you can see what you are looking for:

The Perfect Pumpkin

There are also 2 fairly good websites, but they seem to be for a younger audience.

pumpkinnook.com

pumpkin-patch.com

Lastly if you a fan of forums there is a whole forum dedicated to pumpkins at:

bigpumpkins.com

But they focus on Atlantic Giant pumpkins, a lot of them don't even recognize a regular jack-o-lantern pumpkin when they find them growing. The refer to them as "some sort of squash" or "a cross between a zucchini and a pumpkin" because they don't realize pumpkins start off green. However, they know everything about Atlantic Giants.

I make a Mexican drink/food using squash/pumpkin. This is authentically Mexican, at least in the South Central part of the country and the Eastern Sierra Madre. But I also doctored some of it up to taste like pumpkin pie. That's not authentically Mexican.
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Recipe for Atole de Calabaza
*Cut chunks of winter squash into your pot so that they fit. I left the shell on them and scooped the flesh off after cooking.
*Add sufficient water to boil/steam the squash.
*Add molasses and some cinnamon to the water and squash in the pot, so that the solution will be sweet to taste when finished.
*Cover on low flame and cook till tender.
*Remove shell from chunks and return the flesh to the pot.
*Transfer squash and molasses solution to a blender, add a few "glugs" of milk to each blender full and blend to get rid of strings and chunks. How much you blend is up to you. IÂve had squash atole that had chunks, strings and entire seeds in it, and it was delicious. Our family prefers to blend it to a uniform smoothness. At this time you taste it and add additional sweetener if necessary. The amount I make takes several blender-fulls to finish, as I make about 2 quarts.
*Enjoy! Something that is really good is to dip pieces of French bread or hard roll into the atole as you eat/drink it.
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Americanized Pumpkin Atole
To a blender add:
1 egg
a few glugs of molasses
some sugar (brown or white)
2 cups of cooked squash
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ginger
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
optional  2 or 3 tablespoons of peanut butter
Milk (fill the remaining space in the blender with milk, leaving just a little space at the top.
Blend this all up and taste to see if it needs more sweetening.
Pour the mix into a pot and heat until just boiling.
Serve

George

Very young pumpkins can be sliced and fried like summer squash. I'm growing some Black Thai Pumpkins to try this out.