Jack-o'lantern

The jack-o'lantern I showed in Sunday's post did triple service. I must remember this for next year. Once I had taken the stringy seed-filled pulp out, I carved away at its thick flesh for a while. I left thick enough walls to support carving (in truth, I probably should have taken out much more) and put the pumpkin meat into a covered casserole dish. I cooked it for about an hour at 350F and since then have used the (mashed) pumpkin to make muffins and bread. I will make more muffins tomorrow, I think.

We ate about 1/2 the seeds with lunch yesterday. They'd been cleaned, dried, and roasted, of course. I found that if I put the seeds in a rimmed baking tray (along the lines of a jelly-roll tin) I could easily either let them sit out or pop them into the oven whenever something else had finished cooking. I would wait until the oven had cooled a reasonable amount and then just let them sit in the warm to dry off. That worked well. I have often had trouble getting the seeds properly dry.

The third duty it did, of course, was to be the signal for the non-existent children of our neighbourhood to come by for chocolate. All the more for us, I suppose.