Recycle your halloween pumpkins

Growing up we never did anything with our pumpkins after halloween.  I take that back we did........... we fed them to the pigs.   This year I decided to recycle my pumpkins and use them again.   This is the process of how I did it.  

I washed them and made sure all the dirt was off.  

Then I cut it open and gutted it.  I found that it was easier to take the seeds out before you gut it and then use a spoon or ice cream scoop to get the slimy stuff out.   

Then I put it in the oven at 350 degrees I think that putting them flat on the cookie sheet they cooked more evenly and faster.   This one took probably 2 hours to cook to where the skin just peeled off nicely.   This was a larger pumpkin.

You can see how the skin bubbled up and pulled away from the meat of the pumpkin.  

Then the skin just peels off and you put all of the meat into the blender.  I have a blendtec and it worked wonderfully. 

Then I poured the pureed pumpkin into my freezer cartons.  I let them cool for a while then put them in the freezer.  I measured them out to freeze in the amount I need to make my pumpkin muffins.  So all I need to do is let it thaw and then its ready to add.  I don't have to measure or anything. 

Then I took the seeds and washed them off, patted them dry.  I put them in a bowl and put a tsp of olive oil and then added some garlic salt in one batch and I did some ranch packet mix on another batch.   There are so many options of what you can season them with.   It does make a difference to add the olive oil so that it doesn't stick to the wax paper if you coat them in olive oil.  On one of my batches I just added the seasoning and they stuck to the paper more.  

I spread them out on a cookie sheet with wax paper down to make for easier clean up.  I put them in the oven at 300 degrees for maybe 15 min and stirred them around a bit.   When they start to get browned I took them out.  They taste so good.  They are pretty healthy depending on what you season them with.  

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What I loved about doing this is that the kids loved to help get the seeds out.  They love getting dirty and playing in slimy guts.   They even liked eating the seeds because they had helped make them.  It was fun.  It was also something we already had and used now we were recycling it.  It was a fun thing to try and they are delicious everyone loved them.