Sunday, 31 October 2010

Happy Samhain/Halloween

 

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Yet another month has flown by and my feet feel as if they have barely toughed the ground.  Tonight though is Halloween and above is my very unsteady hand-held photograph of my pumpkin lantern in the garden.

It’s the first year I’ve managed to grow a pumpkin – previous attempts have usually succumbed to either the weather or slugs.  While this one is nowhere near record standard I’m really chuffed.  It came in at 42cm high and 115cm round.  I’ve no idea what it weighed but I could only just carry it.

This is it sat on the kitchen table.

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Large pumpkins also mean:-

toasted pumpkin seeds

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and pumpkin soup, which I think I’ll be eating for the next month!

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Once the above vat has cooled I’ll pass it through a mouli to make sure it’s smooth.

I was worried as to whether I would be able to carve and hollow out such a large pumpkin; my previous efforts had been on smaller supermarket bought pumpkins and I had found them very hard to carve safely.  However even though I’d picked this one around three weeks ago when the weather people forecast a possible frost, it was remarkably easy and I was able to use a soup spoon to scrape out most of the flesh.

Happy Halloween everyone.

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