Eating the Whole Pumpkin

When you first think past the realms of autumn decor and Thanksgiving pies, the pumpkin is a rather unassuming squash. Despite this, pumpkins are perhaps one of the most intriguing ingredients I’ve ever come across. We bought a pumpkin for about $3.00 from a local farm around Halloween, but never bothered to carve it, so recently we decided to cook with it instead. For fun, we added the challenge of using the entire thing (yup, skin and all), which as it happens isn’t too difficult at all! Not only did eating the whole pumpkin eliminate our food waste while preparing it, but we also gained the most we could from what we had: an entire feast! Welcome to the beginning of a new occasional series: “eating the whole ___.” – Sonia B

First, wash your pumpkin.

Cut the pumpkin in half…

and take out all the seeds and the string-like insides. It’s important to keep it in a bowl – don’t throw it out!

Because our pumpkin was old, it was a little drier than a fresh pumpkin, so the flesh had started making even more strings. Pull out as many of those as you can while trying to smooth it down to the frizzlies. If you don’t have that in your pumpkin, move on…

What lovely looking frizzlies! Keep in their own bowl, away from the seeds and the unpleasant inside.

Now it’s time to cut the pumpkin.

You want fairly large half-moon shapes to start.

Then you can peel off the skin (save that, too!) and chop the pumpkin. Before you really cut it, set half the pumpkin aside. You will cut the whole pumpkin in this way eventually, but half will be to bake and half to make soup. If you only want to make one thing, don’t worry about that.

It’s important to be careful when peeling the pumpkin. You want pretty large pieces to make chips, so you want to keep the skin as intact as possible, only cutting off any bad spots, etc. Using a pairing knife, start from one end of the crescent and work in slowly almost till the center, then flip it and cut the other way. Don’t let it meet in the center, put the piece down and finish carefully on the board, otherwise your knife may slip and cut you, as the pumpkin is fairly dense. Alternatively, put the whole piece down to start and do the whole thing on the board. It may be slightly harder to get a very thin separation that way though. You want the skins to be as thin as possible, without the pumpkin attached, as the thicker the piece, the chewier and less chip-like your chips will be.

Now, after quite a while, the pumpkin is sectioned off!

Before you continue, go into your seed bowl with a spoon and separate the seeds into another bowl. These will make a tasty snack. The unpleasant insides that stick around it can be saved separately to make vegetable stock another time. Just put it in a plastic bag and freeze it if you aren’t planning to make it soon.

Sadly, the stem is not edible – but it makes a pretty centerpiece!

Below is everything we made with one pumpkin:

Fried Frizzles — these make a light, garlicky appetizer — best eaten when hot!

Pumpkin chips — a snack for any time, but right out of the oven is delicious!

Frizzle cakes — quite good too, especially when warm, though best avoided if you dislike the texture of squash. (I do, which is why I most enjoy the soup, seeds, and chips myself).

Since you use frizzles for both this and the fried frizzles, it really only makes enough of each for a small appetizer. If you want a more substantial amount, try frizzling more of the pumpkin, make more soup, and don’t make the baked pumpkin at all — baked pumpkin tastes best when the pumpkin is fresh anyway.

Pumpkin seeds — the best snack to munch on, these spicy, salty, sweet seeds will make you regret ever discarding them…

Pumpkin soup – this rich, creamy soup is such a warm and cozy thing to have on a winter evening.

Baked Pumpkin — sweet and savory, it’s pumpkin at its simplest (unless you happen to also have some cauliflower that needs getting rid of — but other than that, stick with just pumpkin. It needs no other vegetable to shine.)

For an afternoon, after much hard work, you’ll have a veritable feast for under $5.00! Not bad at all, for a Sunday family project!