Author by : Sean Carter

It’s time to sing “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays”. With Thanksgiving and Halloween around the corner, it’s the season to carve jack-o-lanterns and roast pumpkin seeds. Pumpkins can be fun to carve, and they are also nutritious food item to prepare and eat. Canned pumpkin is perhaps the best of the lot. Go for a home cooked one “from scratch” pie on this Halloween.

Halloween is almost here and many of us are about to buy pumpkins to carve for our traditional “jack-o-lanterns”. But, before we discard the pumpkin meat, let’s make the most out of it in the coming Halloween. It’s a great fun to prepare fresh pumpkin foods (especially those pies, muffins, and cupcakes!).

Pumpkins can be purchased fresh, or you can go for the canned pre- cooked puree if you are running short of time. Try out the recipe of pumpkin spice cookies, bread, scones, or cranberry-pumpkin waffles, and cheesecake, or even the pumpkin and potato soup with kale. Just browse the pages of your favorite recipe books and I am sure that you will get some more brilliant ideas on it.

It’s interesting to know why people are going crazy about pumpkins. The answer is very simple and the history sounds like a proper short story. Pumpkin pie is now a traditional North American dessert usually made in the late fall and early winter, especially for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The hype was gradually created after the native Americans introduced the food to the pilgrims. During colonial times, colonists would slice off the top of the pumpkin, and remove the seeds, then they used to fill it up with milk, spices and honey, and then bake the concoction in hot ashes. This is how pumpkin pie originated and became a traditional Thanksgiving food. And now, it’s one of the hot food items for Halloween celebrations also. The first pumpkin “pie” was made by Pilgrims in New England about 350 years ago.

We have come a long way from the age of pilgrims. Now it’s the modern era when we run hither and thither to make arrangements for pumpkin festivals. In pumpkin festivals, kids come dressed as pumpkins. This girls bring their pump-kitties. And it is all about thinking, smelling and eating pumpkins. Every year, the World Pumpkin Confederation organizes a contest to find out who can grow the biggest pumpkin. We are now having dozens of such festivals in a year and the most well known one is the Punkin Chunkin Festival in Lewes, Delaware. People make huge slingshots and other crazy contraptions. It’s all about finding out who can hurl a pumpkin the farthest.

The pie generally consists of a squash-based custard. It can have any color from orange to brown and it is baked in a single pie shell, sometimes with a top crust. Add nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and ginger to get the right flavor. Serve it with whipped cream.

Check out some of the best recipes for this Halloween. Layered pumpkin cheesecake pie can be made with a gingersnap crumb crust, a layer of sweetened cream cheese, and a pumpkin layer. Children will love to taste pumpkin pie with a bourbon whipped topping. Or go for a delicious one which is spiced with ginger and cinnamon and vanilla.

Halloween is all about meeting the death and enjoying the horror. Jack- o- lantern was left to rot but some of the seeds started to sprout and it might have happened that after 3 months, new pumpkins might come out with their round heads. Life after death continues… Have a rocking pumpy Halloween! Decorate the pumpkins for scary jack- o- lantern, and eat up the delicious preparations made out of it. Enjoy! It’s pumpkin time!

[tags]Halloween, pumpkin, jack-o-lantern[/tags]

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