Sunday was a day of pumpkins. Of carving and roasting and baking pumpkins. I undertook to try some training in the art of motherhood by trying out some recipes and fun with my nieces. Also, I undertook to get my husband some father training. I joke about this, but in truth he claims he has never carved a pumpkin! Can you believe that?! Well now he can not say that!
We started with carving the pumpkins. There was four of us, so it made sense that we have four pumpkins. Andrew carved the whole in the top, and away we went! **Note of advise from my dad: Make a notch in the "lid" of the pumpkin so that it matches up in the correlating spot on the pumpkin. So that when you put the lid back on, you don't have to rotate it a bajillion times, you can just shove it in where the notches match up. **
Of course with pumpkin carving comes the guts. Save them. You will see why later. In the mean time you can play with them.
Carving the inside of a pumpkin out can be hard work. make sure its all clean. From our trial and error method, and my own lifetime of experience in this, you must carve a bit in with your spoon. This also works great for your stock pile of pumpkin guts. Yay more!
Sometimes it's good to get a second opinion on the cleanliness of your pumpkin.... and if it's not clean enough... well there's uncle to do it for you!
Then you get to decorate your pumpkin! Two options for us where: decorate by hand, or decorate by printing one off. My youngest niece first chose the first option and started drawing on her pumpkin. Pencil works fine for this.
I, however, chose to be lazy/take advantage of someone else's work, and chose to use a free printable design i Googled. Search words I used: Pumpkin pattern, pumpkin patter jack, pumpkin pattern free, pumpkin patter tall (I had a tall pumpkin!)
I started out cutting each individual piece out then trying to fit them properly on my pumpkin. Sounded good, right? Yeah until i had to tape it onto the pumpkin!
In the end what works better is taping the page onto your pumpkin. Now because a pumpkin is not flat (duh) you have to "mold" the page to the pumpkin. by this I mean rip strips in it so that they can overlap.. sort of like wrapping a round gift. ...well actually that's exactly what it's like.
The next job is to cut the pumpkin. This is better handled by those who are legally liable or can take such liabilities, in other words - adults. Andrew did most of the cutting for the two girls - I just did our own pumpkins. I followed suit after him, once I realized that my way of cutting didn't work so well.
At this point I should point out what tools we were using to cut. An old steak knife, two paring knives, an old peeler...and that was it **If you have the option to use a kit.. i would suggest it!**. I took the steak knife, Andrew took the paring knife..and we were off. I started trying to cut right through immediately, and just ended up taking forever. I then moved onto Andrew's way of it: which was make shallow cuts in the entire outline of your piece. In our situation where there was paper over top, the paper eventually crumbled away, but the lines were clearly etched. From then on it was much easier to cut the pieces out.
It is a good idea to have a supervisor when children are handling knives. That
should go without saying. My nieces are in their early teens and tweens, therefore handling a knife should be a skill they have acquired. Andrew let them do the easier parts - this was a good idea. Luckily no injuries were caused and they cut that pumpkin like champions! I on the other hand managed to stab myself 3 times.
After the pumpkin is carved, you
must take pictures with it with the appropriate amount of pride!
The next step (if you are carving more then a couple days before Halloween is to make sure your pumpkin lasts until Halloween. Sometimes this is as simple as not putting your pumpkin out on the front stoop until the evening of, less vagrant teens get it.... other times you need to protect against mold and decay. Since I am not too worried about the vagrant teens (being that most of them seem to think we are drug dealers or thugs, being that we have 4 vehicles...1 of which is an old Cadillac the other is some massive Buick), the only thing I felt need to protect against was mold and decay. This is solved by giving your pumpkins a bit o' the spa treatment.
Bath time it is! Though i wouldn't be joining them! Your pumpkins should go in a bath of water and bleach. I added a ton of bleach to smell (not so smart i think as the insides started turning white.) I imagine all you need is a cup or less..however I always go a bit overboard and just estimated with a couple glugs of the bottle.
I left them in there for a while as we went to go work on the our pumpkin remains.
You take the meat of the pumpkin and put in a dish and bake it like you would squash. For me that was put it in a large pan and cover in oil and put in the oven at 400 F. I didn't time it, i just went by feel. When it was mushy I was done. Every once in a while I would mix it around a bit to make sure that it wasn't burning and to check the consistency.
I threw out the stringy brains of the pumpkin. I didn't need them - and I couldn't think of a good enough use. I'm sure there are plenty, and there are plenty of websites that help you with that. I do know that if you wanted, you could make a puree out of it that would be similar to anything you get out of a can (well except that what you get out of a can is more squash then pumpkin). Baby food was one option for the puree - however I don't have a baby....so that kind of ruled that out.
For the seeds the first thing we needed to do was clean them. We set up stations. We cleaned and filled both sinks with warm water and added a lot of salt. We then set out clean towels for drying.
All the seeds went into the first sink. It was then moved by quality control into the second sink. quality control needed to check to make sure there was 'no orange'. This meant that there had to be no pumpkin guts attached to the seeds at all.
The second sink would have a second quality control person who would double check and put the seeds into a bowl for the third person to place on the towel. It was only when we were almost done that I figured out we could add a strainer into the mix and it was make it a hell of a lot easier, vs. constantly wading into salt water.
The seeds would go in layers on the towels. One layer thick.
Once all the seeds are down you can press on the layers of towels and seeds to attempt to dry them out faster...
From then on you butter up your pans and clean up your sinks.
Once pans are buttered you can lay down your seeds, again one layer thick only.
They can go in the oven. I was still cooking the pumpkin meat, so they went in at 400 F. Watch them closely... they can "pop" but also you do not want to burn them. How crunchy you want them depends on your own preference.
Take them out every once in a while and move them around, attempting to get both sides equally done.
While your seeds are roasting you can get whatever seasoning you want. some are happy with salt. I prefer a bit more flavor. I found popcorn seasoning worked wonders! dill pickle is a favorite of mine, as well as all dressed! We had a couple ziploc bags with our flavors. Make sure to label them! **Note: premixed seasons or "old faithful" seasons are better then attempting to make your own out of, say, steak spices...that doesn't taste too good. trust us.**
Once the seeds are roasted, divide evenly and add to the bags. Now is a good time for music and dancing cause you can shake your booties off getting the seasoning all over these seeds!
Then you eat!
Or in my case, you finish making pumpkin pie. Take whatever peel is left on your chunks of the meat of the pumpkin and puree. From then I added all the ingredients I needed for pumpkin pie and continued on with my normal recipe. Again, you can find many different recipes online. I had enough for three pumpkin pies. I only made two (cause that's how many pie crusts I had) and have put the other in a sealed container to make pie later.
Finally! To finish off your/my day of pumpkin making extravaganza, you need to make sure all pumpkins look good. So here is the finished product, equipped not with candles, but those fake ones that won't cause fires! You can get them real cheap at Walmart around Halloween. I got a pack of 6 for under $5.
to go. 
