How to Roast Pumpkin Seeds (and Carve a Pumpkin)

Hi everyone.

So this was supposed to be posted a month ago but I've had some problems with Wix. So sorry!

Here is the post:

This weekend was a good one. I saw family, I don't see them as much anymore because life just gets in the way. But it was a good one.

Besides watching a new episode of Unsolved Mysteries with my sister Sam, we also carved some pumpkins and then I roasted the seeds.

Surprisingly, the first time I ever ate roasted pumpkin seeds was last weekend, when I painted a different pumpkin with some good friends of mine (I'll post that photo here, too. :)

To make roasted pumpkin seeds, throw the seeds (they will have some guts attached) into a bowl of water. Swish it around with your hands and let most of the seeds rise to the top. Pull the rest off the guts, leaving no gut on the seeds.

Line two separate pans of parchment paper, trimmed to fit the sheet.

Place the pumpkin seeds on the sheets into two equally divided batches. I have so many because the seeds are from three large (and one small) pumpkin, so keep that in mind when using my measurements below.

Allow the seeds to dry for an hour or two. They should be mostly, if not entirely, dry before you roast them.

When the seeds are dry, preheat your oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. For olive oil and sea salt roast pumpkin seeds, drizzle 3 tablespoons of olive oil and 3/4 teaspoon fine sea salt onto the seeds. For cinnamon sugar roast pumpkin seeds, sprinkle a mix of 3 tablespoons granulated sugar and 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon on seeds. Roast for an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how your oven works.

I personally haven't tried using brown sugar on pumpkin seeds but I bet it would give an amazing molasses flavor. You would have to watch for it burning, though.

You'll know they're ready when they crunch. So, so good. An amazing, nutty flavor.

Before we got to those seeds, though, we had to carve the pumpkins. We are all on the older side of the child spectrum (our youngest is 15) so we carved with surrogated kitchen knives. I found carving my pumpkin from the bottom to be the safest and quickest. I went for a simple carving (see below) and my siblings went for their own unique ones, too.

Overall it was an awesome weekend. Besides the cost of the pumpkins, it further taught me that joy can come from simplicity- we didn't need fancy pumpkin carving kits, or pumpkin spice lattes, or a trip to the movie theater to have a good time. All it took was some pumpkins from the grocery store down the street, knives in our kitchen, and some Netflix.

What a blessing.

Happy Fall, y'all.

Oh and btw here was my pumpkin from last week: