Pumpkin! Preparing Fresh Pumpkin, Roasted Seeds, Thai Pumpkin Soup

My neighbor brought over her leftover Halloween pumpkin. She'd never gotten around to carving it so rather than just throw it out, she gave it to me. How sweet!

A looooong time ago, when I was a young teenager and very interested in cooking from scratch, I decided to cook our carved jack-o-lantern from Halloween the night before. I scraped out the black from the candle soot, cut the pumpkin into large chunks, and stuck them into a pot of boiling water. The results were hardly salutatory: I'd boiled a good portion of the flesh into a slurry. What was left was barely enough to make a pie. It was a very good pie, but that was all I got from my efforts.

This time I decided to bake the pumpkin - I wasn't going to lose any of the fruit this time around. I baked half of it in my teeny-weensy Easy Bake Oven-sized apartment oven, chopped up part of the second half and then baked what was left. That's what you get to do when working with a less than optimal kitchen.

Baking a Pumpkin

Going From Fresh to Puree

Getting ready to go in the oven

Puree ready for creative baking

• Cut the pumpkin in half and discard the stem section and stringy pulp. Save the seeds to dry and roast.
• In a shallow baking dish, place the two halves face down and cover with foil.
• Bake in a preheated 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) oven for about 1½ hours, or until tender.
• Once the baked pumpkin has cooled, scoop out the flesh and puree or mash it.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

This is a fun recipe for pumpkin seeds you can flavor to your liking.  You can use plain salt, or make it sweet with apple pie spices, or make it curry flavored, or spicy, or whatever you want. I used Hawaiian Cajun by Kaiulani Spices (a local Hawaiian company) to make a spicy/sweet mixture.  Yum!

Seeds prior to cleaning

Seeds from your pumpkin (perhaps 1 1/2 cups worth)
salted water for boiling

1 tablespoon butter, melted
1 tablespoon seasoned salt (whatever flavor sounds good to you)
1 teaspoon sugar (optional)

After removing the seeds from your pumpkin, separate most of the pulp and strings from the seeds. Rinse the seeds in water to remove the rest of the pulp.

Cleaned seed

Boil the seeds in the salted water for twenty minutes. You're doing this so you get some of the salt INTO the seeds instead of having all the salt on the outside hulls.

Drain the water. Lay your seeds out on a cookie sheet to dry over night.

Next morning

Ready for the oven

Preheat oven to 300 F.

Mix the melted butter with the seasoned salt. Toss the seed in the butter mix and spread out in a single layer on the cookie sheet. Bake for 45 minutes.

Remove from oven and sprinkle the sugar over the hot seeds.



Thai Pumpkin Soup

This soup is full of coconut-lime flavor.  It wasn't as orange as I thought it should be due to the type of pumpkin I used.  I think kabocha pumpkin would be much more orange.  Never mind the color, this is a yummy soup!


Yield 4 servings
Prep Time: 10 Min
Cook Time: 15 Min
Ready In: 25 Min

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon butter
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 onion, chopped
2 small fresh red chili peppers, chopped
1 lime, grate the peel, then cut lime in half and juice
2 1/8 cups chicken stock
4 cups peeled and diced pumpkin
1 14-oz can unsweetened coconut milk
1 bunch fresh basil or cilantro leaves. chopped

Butterfly grew our peppers at school!

In a medium saucepan, heat oil and butter over low heat. Cook garlic, onions, chilies, and grated lime rind in oil until fragrant (be careful not to burn the garlic). Stir in chicken stock, lime juice, coconut milk, pumpkin, and the juiced lime halves; bring to a boil. Cook until pumpkin softens.

Remove the lime halves. When cool, squeeze everything back into the soup. Discard lime halves.

In a blender, blend the soup in batches to a smooth or slightly chunky consistency, whatever you prefer. Serve with basil or cilantro leaves.