Weekend Carnivore

Every year millions of children throughout the Halloween-celebrating world are presented with the glorious orange spheres. They approach them with initial joy, gut them and carve them with as much Halloween spirit they can muster as visions of bags full of candy dance in their heads. Then, comes the inevitable morning of Novemeber the 1st and it is all down hill from there for those once loved pumpkins. If they are lucky, they hang around on the porch for another few days before rotting into oblivion.

Time for us to end this cycle! Folks, pumpkins aren’t just for Halloween!

Joking aside, there really are many recipes that can be made with pumpkin rather than simply carving funny patterns in them. Even if your only purpose for buying the pumpkin is to to carve it you can still preserve its dignity as a food item by making good use of all those seeds you have to scoop out.

Learning how to roast pumpkin seeds, or in this case toast pumpkin seeds, really is very easy and can take very little time at all. Toasting pumpkin seeds only requires, a pan, a tiny bit of oil and some seasoning.

Once you have the method for toasting pumpkin seeds down, you can experiment with all sorts of seasoning combinations. The only limit is your sense of adventure. I have found that most combinations that work with nuts will usually work with toasted pumpkin seeds too.

Since, I was making this particular batch of toasted pumpkin seeds for Halloween, I decided to make them nice and spicy. Now, I am a spice wimp. What I think it spicy is usually barely even hot for real lovers of hot food. So, by all means feel free to add more chilli powder if you really like things hot and spicy.

Spicy toasted pumpkin seed recipe

spicy toasted pumpkin seeds recipe

Ingredients:
3/4 cup pumpkin seeds, freshly removed from the pumpkin
1 teaspoon chilli infused olive oil or olive oil
1/2 teaspoon dried chilli flakes
1/2 teaspoon chilli powder, I used mild but go with your own spice comfort levels
1 hearty pinch, sea salt

Directions:

1. Rinse off the pumpkin seeds trying to remove as much of the pulp as possible. Pat dry.
2. Put the pumpkin seeds in a bowl and toss with the oil.
3. Heat a skillet until very hot and then turn down to medium.
4. Add the oil-tossed pumpkin seeds and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly. They are ready when they have started to go golden brown but they can quickly burn so be careful to watch.
5. Remove from heat and carefully transfer the pumpkin seeds to a bowl.
6. Add the chilli flakes, chilli powder and sea salt to the toasted pumpkin seeds and toss to evenly distribute.
7. Let the toasted pumpkin seeds sit for a couple minutes just to allow them to crisp up and then serve.

Serves: 4

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