"pumpkins" news and stories

Well, with all of the pumpkin-related Halloween stuff we did yesterday, this seems like it's a day too late, but there's still plenty of pumpkin food to talk about.

It's Pumpkin Day, so maybe this is the day you can go to your supermarket or your favorite pumpkin-selling farmstand to get some pumpkins for your home and/or yard. But what about recipes? PumpkinNook.com has a ton of recipes, including many pumpkin pie, cookie, and cake recipes. Here's a recipe for Pumpkin Custard from Bon Appetit, while PastryWiz has one for Pumpkin Nut Bread.

I love pumpkins, but I always find it a waste to carve them into Jack o' Lanterns. The big pumpkins aren't that good to eat anyway, but even if you get the cute small sugar pie pumpkins, carve them up, and let them sit out in the open air on your front porch for two weeks, you have to throw them away when you're all done. The better thing to do is to decorate pumpkins in a way that you can eat them later. Painting faces on them is fine, but messy and requires time and creativity. Now I'm not saying you're not creative, but there is that time issue.

Thankfully, you can just pick up some Halloween "costumes" for your pumpkins, a la Mr. Potato Head. All of the costume pieces are pushed into the pumpkin, the same way you push them into Mr. Potato Head. These are made specifially for pumpkins, since they're bigger than the toy, but if you're dressing up smaller pumpkins, nothing's stopping you from nabbing your kids' toys out of the playroom and using them!

The Pirate, R2D2, and other "costumes" are available on Amazon.

I've never given much thought as to whether South Africans celebrate Thanksgiving. However, when I read that a team of bakers created what they're calling the the world's largest pumpkin pie last weekend, I'm beginning to think folks in Pretoria might just have their own version Thanksgiving.

The 1.15 ton treat took two days to make and bake and measured some 3 feet deep. It's worth noting that the pie's other dimensions were 28 feet long and 7 feet wide. While I'm all for the South Africans trying to break a record set by a group of U.S. farmers two years ago (pictured), someone needs to tell the South Africans that pies are round. If the dimensions I read are not a typo, the mammoth pumpkin pastry qualifies as a loaf with a crust, but not a pie. A ton of the orange gourd was used to make the "pie." As of press time, there's been no reports of how many pounds of Cool Whip were used to top the purported pie.

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I have very strong memories of carving pumpkins when I was a kid. My parents would cover the dining room table in newspaper, bring out strong serving spoons (for scraping down the inside of the pumpkin) and put a large metal mixing bowl in the middle of the table. All the pumpkin innards would go into that bowl and while my sister, dad and I were happily carving our pumpkins into goofy, spooky faces, my mom would get the not-so-nice job of separating the pumpkin guts from the seeds.

She was meticulous about liberating every last seed from the slimy strings of pumpkin entrails. She'd rinse the seeds well and dry them in a single layer on a kitchen towel. Then she'd spread them out on a rimmed baking sheet, sprinkle them with salt and roast them in the oven until they turned golden brown. I loved taking a little container of these roasted pumpkin seeds to school with me for an after lunch treat and I was always sad when they were gone.

Yesterday I toasted up the seeds from a small baking pumpkin I had. I didn't do it quite the way my mom used to. Instead, I melted a small pat of butter in a medium non-stick skillet. When it was melted, I added the seeds and let them start to toast. When they were getting near the brown color I was going for, I added some kosher salt, cracked pepper and crushed, dried rosemary leaves. A couple last tosses in the pan to combine the seasonings and they were done. Just like childhood (if even slightly better).

Find more ideas for pumpkin seed recipes on KitchenDaily.

This is a little too Invasion of the Body Snatchers for my liking, but it's certainly interesting: vegetables shaped like Mickey Mouse.

It's part of what you'll find at the greenhouse exhibit The Land at EPCOT. There are Mickey pumpkins and Mickey cucumbers, all created through special ear-shaped molds that hang throughout the greenhouses. As you know, EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and this is part of the interesting experiments going on there. They're not really doing all of the things promised years ago (a real community, no cars, creating a modern world, etc), but some of the agriculture experiments continue.

[via Boing Boing]