I made soup out of a Halloween pumpkin and it didn’t completely suck

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Our neighborhood of tiny, overpriced bungalows is the place to go trick or treating, for some reason. A record keeping neighbor counted 300 trick or treaters at his door this weekend. He had collaborated with another neighbor on an elaborate, coordinated display: Mount Olympus vs. Hades. Up on Mt. Olympus (one side of our street is 30 feet higher than the other), Zeus wielded a shiny cardboard lightening bolt, while down below the devil dealt with those 300 kids. I made a mental note to up our Halloween decor game next year as all we had was one hastily carved pumpkin and two uncarved pumpkins.

The next day, surveying the trail of candy wrappers on the sidewalk, I felt a little guilty about those uncarved pumpkins. I resolved to eat them. An NPR story, “Do We Waste a Lot of Pumpkins We Could Be Eating?“, tipped me off to an Epicurious Curried Pumpkin soup recipe that uses coconut milk and hot pepper flakes. The recipe takes advantage of the fact that you could make delicious soup out of cat litter with coconut milk and hot pepper flakes.

Of course that same soup would taste a lot better made with a kabocha squash. And Halloween pumpkins make great worm food. But I was reasonably pleased with the soup, especially after it had mellowed in the fridge for a day.

How was your Halloween? What do you do with the leftover pumpkins?

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16 Comments

  1. I took one of my winter squash (I don’t know what variety it is–whatever the lady at the farmer’s market recommended in terms of being decent looking and good for food), baked it whole, and then took about half the flesh and mixed it with an egg. I dredged spoonfuls in flour, then fried them. Served with maple syrup, it was wonderfully delicious if not particularly healthy!

  2. I have not had Trick or Treaters since I lived in LA. Elsewhere everyone seems to be afraid to let their kids out in the neighborhood. Sad, as I really liked seeing all the little ones dressed up. But when I did live there I always boiled up the chunks of pumpkins and either froze or canned them and added some to stews and soups later on for added nutrition. And we always roasted and salted the seeds for a snack. Sometimes we added onion or garlic salt. I miss those days.
    Question: Did you get as many kids on your side of the street? Climbing all those stairs up to you house had to be a good workout for the kids and I bet they compared notes on whether the candy given out was worth the climb!

  3. Every year, I look for abandoned jack ‘o lantern and whole pumpkins, all on the road for trash pickup. I even got about 8 assorted pumpkins and gourds and squashes from a neighbor one year. My goal is to get chicken food. My hens love a pumpkin. Last year, to my amazement, they pecked a face in one of the pumpkins before they ate it.

  4. I read the article and I”m not sure…..I don’t tend to reface the house for Halloween, so I don’t buy large pumpkins for decoration. Not that I am against it, I’m just lazy I guess and don’t entirely feel comfortable buying something edible, displaying it and then tossing it.
    That being said, I don’t know that composting a carved pumpkin is wasting it. I’d gleefully add any carved pumpkins to my pile if I came across available ones. I am not sure that the NPR article is covering all the aspects of pumpkin disposal. As the commenters on the article noted composting and chicken feed are good ways to use them after Halloween have passed.
    Also, I don’t like the stringiness of the large pumpkins. I know they are edible, but I don’t care for them. They were bred for transportation and looks, not taste and texture. I prefer the pie pumpkins, so that’s where my money from my grocery budget goes when I’m hunting for pumpkin in the store.

  5. Chickens! There’s nothing wrong with purposing livestock-grade food for livestock feed and eating the tastier stuff. Chickens gotta eat!

  6. I also don’t buy pumpkins just to decorate. I do have a ceramic one in the house among other things. I decorate outside but with cute ghosts and lights etc. I love Halloween, I love all the houses decorated and the kids in costumes….we don’t get a lot of kids at the door but enough to have a fun night.
    I’m also not fond of creamed soup especially made with pumpkin/squash, so I don’t ever have to worry about what to do with the leftovers.

  7. Most pumpkin in the can is Hubbard squash. Or some squash.

    When my daughter was about four-years-old, I roasted our pumpkin seeds and put on a bit of salt. I had no idea what I was doing, but she ate pumpkin seeds until I was afraid she had eaten too many and stopped her. She was finishing off the seeds from three pumpkins!

    Lots of people decorate with pumpkins and corn stalks or bales of hay. They never carve their pumpkins. So, these are still edible.

    I am not a fan of these types of soups. So, I can just make a pie and have that for dinner. Actually, I have done that before. I eat nothing else for a whole day.

    My neighbor’s pumpkins served as compost, chicken food, and I made pumpkin butter, just like you make apple butter.

  8. In years past I’ve made sweet pickled pumpkin. It doesn’t do anything for me, but I am afflicted with friends who don’t like the taste anything that is acidic or vinegary—which leaves more of my prized pickled cucumbers for me. So I take the pickled pumpkin cubes to get togethers where people rave about them. (Go figure, there’s no accounting for taste.)

  9. Our neighbors’ 11-year-old daughter carved the symbol for pi in her jack-o-lantern this year. She would say, “Pumpkin pi…tastes like math,” and then crack up laughing.

    Whatever it tasted like, the chickens greatly enjoyed it afterward. Although it did not appear to make them smarter…

  10. I have no problem with using pumpkins only as decoration as long as they aren’t being sent to a landfill. Feed them to poultry, toss them into the woods for the wildlife, let them rot in the garden to feed the soil and worms – none of it is wasted. People worked to grow them and earn an income. Someone might have earned an income by selling them.

    I’ll be roasting all of the seeds from our seven or eight varieties. Some of them will be used for pie and breads and the unsavory ones will be enjoyed by the chickens and ducks.

  11. We grow a handful of the sugar pie pumpkins in our yard. I peel and bake them, then mash them up and put them in the freezer to cook with for the next several months. Red lentil and pumpkin soup, pumpkin pancakes & waffles, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin pasta, pumpkin granola, all sorts of things, plus of course the seeds. I’ll use the runts to decorate the front porch. If I miss a few in the garden, and the decorative runts as well, I’ll just leave them to decompose where they are, and figure the local birds & bugs will enjoy them.

  12. Ben Starr (of benstarr.com) cooks with normal pumpkins. The trick is to get all the excess water out of the roasted pumpkin puree. This concentrates the pumpkin flavor. Just roast, puree, then pour it out onto clean towels. And press with a towel. After half an hour you can fold up the puree and dump it wherever you like to cook with. Wring out the towels. 🙂

  13. I also made soup with ours (after roasting it). Not bad, and a lot better than letting it go to waste. Before pumpkins got popular, there was a long tradition here in the UK of using turnips for Halloween lanterns. They’re a lot harder to carve but they might make for tastier soup. Maybe I’ll try one next year.

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