Whose Shoes are These?: Pumpkin Tales

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Pumpkin Tales

So the family sat down last night to carve pumpkins. Rich handled all the heavy machinery - he literally pulled out his drill and hole saw - and Brynn scooped out the insides of her "perfect" pumpkin. Cannon even participated by throwing some of the "guts" around the kitchen a bit. He wasn't too excited with the texture of the pumpkin guts, but they were fun to throw and squish around. While they were busy cleaning out the insides, I was salvaging the seeds for a yummy roasting recipe. The two large pumpkins yielded a good number of big seeds, and Brynn's "perfect" pumpkin was a jackpot of "perfect" little seeds. Funny how the smaller pumpkins seem to have more seeds, of better quality. As I cleaned, drained and soaked the all of the seeds, I was reminded of another Halloween pumpkin seed situation.
Last Halloween, I had the bright idea to take a HUGE pumpkin from the freebie section of Craigslist. Rich grumbled and groaned about having to go pick it up, and load it into our car, and then unload it into our garage. I had successfully roasted seeds from our normal size pumpkins, and was gun-ho about doing some more. The HUGE, free pumpkin was nothing but a win-win situation for me.
We put it in the garage, commented on it's enormous size, and of course, ran out of time that day to do anything with it. A day turned into two, and then a week. I finally had time to go out and begin carving up the pumpkin for what I thought was going to be a mother load of seeds to roast. Boy, was I wrong. Apparently - as our carving last night demonstrated - the larger the pumpkin, the less quality and amount of seeds there seem to be. We opened up that HUGE pumpkin - with the help of a saw-zaw, and hammer - only to find the insides full of mold, and about 6 rotten-looking seeds. What a waste. I was shocked, disappointed and even a little bit mad. I wasn't the only one who was mad. You can only guess Rich's dismay when he found out he had to cut that enormous pumpkin into trashcan-size pieces so that we could dispose of it slowly. (This being another family issue, since we have the smallest trashcan that the garbage company offers in order to save a bit of money.) It took a weeks to dispose of all that pumpkin, and I didn't even get any seeds. Bummer.
The moral of the story: (true for both gifts and pumpkins) the best things come in small packages...