Don't Bin the Pumpkin
You carve a face into it, scoop the insides into the bin, and put a candle inside. Two of those three steps are right.
There’s a particular sound a pumpkin makes when you scrape it out. A wet, ropey, deeply unpleasant sound. And then most of us carry that whole bowl of seeds and stringy orange guts straight to the bin.
Understandable. It looks like nothing. But there’s a decent amount of food in there, and October is not the month to be throwing food away.
The seeds are the easy win
This is the part almost everyone knows about and almost nobody does, because separating seeds from pulp by hand is a miserable ten minutes.
Don’t do it by hand. Put the whole lot — seeds, strings, the horror — into a big bowl of cold water. The seeds float. The pulp sinks, mostly, and what doesn’t sink comes away with a swirl of your fingers. Two minutes instead of ten.
Then the part that matters: dry them properly. Spread them on a tea towel and leave them an hour, or overnight if you’ve the patience. Wet seeds steam in the oven instead of roasting, and steamed seeds are chewy and sad.
Oil, salt, a single layer on a tray. A slow oven — 150°C, 300°F — for thirty to forty minutes, giving them a shake halfway. You want pale gold, not brown. They crisp further as they cool, so take them out a shade before you think you should.
If you want to be clever about it: a pinch of smoked paprika and a little cayenne turns them into something you’ll eat standing over the tray. But salt alone is no hardship.
Now, the flesh — and an honest word
Here’s where most articles will cheerfully tell you to make soup. I’ll be straight with you instead.
A carving pumpkin is not very good eating. Those big field pumpkins are bred for size and a sturdy wall you can cut a face into, not for flavour. The flesh is watery and stringy and tastes faintly of not much. A sugar pumpkin or a crown prince squash will make you a soup worth sitting down to. A jack-o’-lantern will make you an apology.
That doesn’t mean bin it. It means don’t build a dinner around it.
What it’s genuinely good for is stock. Roast the flesh in chunks until the edges catch, then simmer it with an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf and whatever herb stalks you’ve been hoarding in the freezer. You’ll get a sweet, gentle vegetable stock that’s lovely under a risotto or a barley soup — somewhere the pumpkin is a foundation rather than the star.
Or roast it hard with oil and salt until it’s properly caramelised, mash it, and fold it into bread dough or a batch of scones. Concentrated by the oven and carried by something else, it earns its place.
One thing that isn’t optional
Only eat the flesh you take out on carving day.
Once a pumpkin has been carved, it’s an open, damp, room-temperature invitation to every bacterium in the house — and if there’s been a candle burning in it, the inside has been sitting warm for hours. A carved pumpkin that’s been on the step for three nights is a decoration and nothing else. Compost it without regret.
So: scoop, set aside what you want to cook, cook it that day or get it in the freezer. The one on the doorstep has a different job.
The rest of the season
The same principle holds all autumn. The bits people throw away are often the bits with the most flavour in them — squash skins crisp beautifully, the green tops of leeks make better stock than the white parts, and broccoli stalks are sweeter than the florets if you peel them.
A cook who wastes nothing isn’t being frugal. They’re paying attention.
If you’ve got a squash on the counter and no idea what to do with it, come and ask me. That’s rather the point of me.
— Seamus