What to do with Pumpkins after Halloween (and a Pumpkin Recipe!)
By Steven Biggs
Cook Your Halloween Pumpkins
The smell of freshly carved pumpkin is a memory trigger for me. Along with the smell, the gooey, stringy feeling when I reach inside a pumpkin to pull out the seeds makes me feel like a kid again.
I still enjoy thinking up fun faces to carve. One year I carved a blue hubbard squash into an elephant. The pointy stem end was the trunk! (Carving it was challenging. Hubbard squash store well because of the hard, thick rind.)
After Halloween, I cook our jack-o-lanterns. First, I cut them up into manageable chunks. Then I roast the chunks, uncovered, on a cookie sheet.
Once the flesh is cooked and soft, I scrape it from the skin and puree it with an immersion blender. I use some of the pureed pumpkin right away; and freeze some for later. My kids love pumpkin muffins, so I often make a batch of muffins as I’m processing our jack-o-lanterns. (Recipe below.)
Besides muffins, I use home-cooked pumpkin puree for any recipe that calls for tinned pumpkin: pies, pudding, soup, loaves. Pumpkins sold for jack-o-lanterns are not usually as sweet as pie pumpkins, and they’re often a bit more watery. So I adjust recipes accordingly.
Recipe: Pumpkin Muffins
Nana Biggs’ pumpkin muffin recipe. I halve the sugar, and add raisins and nuts.
One of Nana Biggs’ favourite recipes was pumpkin muffins. As a kid, I’d cut up my jack-o-lantern the day after Halloween, and then pack it up to take to Nana. She kept me well fed with muffins!
(My Uncle Bill didn’t like me giving Nana so much pumpkin, because he didn’t like the muffins. I never let him forget that. One year, after I’d moved away from home, I baked him a cake-sized muffin and sent it to him by courier!)
Pumpkin Muffin Recipe
Ingredients
2 eggs
1 cup white sugar
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup pumpkin
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
Directions
Cream together eggs, sugar, and oil
Add pumpkin
Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt
Bake at 350°F for approximately 30 minutes, until done
Note: I halve the sugar and use less oil if the pumpkin is more watery than tinned pumpkin
Roasted Pumpkin Seeds
I roast the pumpkin seeds too.
After I rinse them (to remove slime and stringy bits), I toss them with a bit of vegetable oil, salt, and garlic powder. Then I roast them on a cookie sheet until they start to make a popping sound.
In my daughter Emma’s book, Gardening with Emma, she tells kids how pumpkins in the garden start to sag, and then become spots on the soil by spring.
(If you’ve ever wondered about hulless pumpkin seeds, the ones you see at the store are not individually shelled. They are from a pumpkin variety that produces hulless seeds.)
Can you Compost Pumpkins?
Any pumpkins that I don’t cook end up feeding the soil. I sit them on the garden, outside our back window. Then, we watch them slowly collapse into the soil. My daughter Emma shares this idea in her book Gardening with Emma.
You can also put your jack-o-lanterns in the compost pile.
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Written for kids by a kid, this guide helps kids see the fun side of gardening, whether it’s growing giant vegetables, making a bug vacuum, or making a sound-themed garden.
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