I moved in with one of my best friends last year. Before that, I was fairly boring. Fairly jealous and fairly boring. I'm always jealous when holiday season comes around and I have nobody to share my holidays with. Well, that has since changed and this is my 2nd Halloween that I've gotten to celebrate. What better way to celebrate than to carve your own pumpkin?
I had a few days to come up with a decent concept. I was thinking back to last year when I gave my pumpkin a jew nose and remembered how unsuccessful it was. So I just waited for carving day to come up with my really excellent concept. And here it is:
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| Don't mess with my pumpkin. He was in Nam. |
It was an ultra easy design and it is super classy. Even with the cigarette.
The cooking portion of today's post is dedicated to my good friend Natalie over at the Devil Wears Parsley food blog. I just want to give her a good comparison of crappy food shots compared to her wonderful and outstanding food shots. And they make me so Hungry!! I almost want to turn into the Hulk because I'm on a hunger rage, when I see those pictures.
Now after Halloween is when the real fun starts. Its time to put the seeds to good use. So here are my steps to making killer pumpkin seeds.
1. clean off your seeds. You'll want to get rid of all the guts and the sprouting seeds. Put your seeds in a collator/strainer and rinse them off pretty good. It's not a big deal if you leave little pieces of guts on the seeds, they burn off in the baking process.
2. Lay out a cookie sheet, put some paper towel down and spread seeds on paper towel and let them dry for about a day, 12 hours at least, IMO.
3. Choose what flavor you would like on your seeds. I chose to make two different kinds since I had just way too many. Half of my seeds were olive oil and salt only and the other half were a mix of olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce and salt. They were pretty bad ass.
4. Set your oven temperature to about 250 degrees. Some ovens have varying temperatures. so watch out for that. Another time factor is what you put on the seeds. my "plain seeds" took about 3/4 the time that my coated seeds took.
5. Bake for 20 min- or till whenever you think they are done. Usually done is when you can chew the shell and it pretty much disintegrates when you chew it.
6. Eat them and Enjoys! And don't use a pre used plate when you are going to take a good food shot like me!
If you are into the food network or like looking at good food, I strongly urge you all to check out The Devil Wears Parsley. It's well worth your time!!
And now, today, I shall close the show with a goofy Halloween picture with myself in it. Thanks and let me know what you guys think! Comments, as usual are very much appreciated.
