Woohooo! Hi friends :)
We all know what we are doing today… celebrating #fruitsandveggiesmonday with @lenasveganliving and brand spanking new judge, @gguy773. It’s good to be here y’all.
As we are just getting out of October, which is pumpkin everything month in my book, I thought I’d share my pumpkin carving experience this year. Pumpkin art gets pret-tea serious in my house. Dandays just popped his pumpkin carving cherry last year, and he did so like a pro. This year we tussled over carving spots, carving tools and maybe a short discussion about our carving designs but as always we got it all figured out.
I know what you’re thinking, “yeah, but where is the food puravidaville?” Well, I’ll get there but I think that this may be my last chance to post a pumpkin carving swaray, and I’m going to take it.
First, you must scout your carving location. Our apartment is pretty small so this part was easy, in the kitchen of course :).
Second, you must prep your work area. We did this with cut garbage bags to avoid a pumpkin mess everywhere. It helps a little.
I decided to bring my pumpkin to the sink for easy access to the garbage and strainer (you’ll see why), while gutting this bad boy.
Those scrapers that come with the rinky dink pumpkin carving set you buy at the grocery store work really well. Look how nice the inside of that thing looks 🙄
See what I mean about that strainer now?
I wet my decal and wrap it to my pumpkin like so. This is where @dandays and I get into a passionate discussion about how much skill it takes to carve a pumpkin this way. I suppose he would know, this is his second year in a row after all 🤷🏼♀️ wink wink.
It takes me a little over an hour and some good music and tahhhdaaaa! We’ve got a jack-o-lantern…
Dandays was a bit disappointed that this year his didn’t turn out so well. He is quite an ambitious pumpkin carver and set out to free hand carve an EOS symbol. Last year, his bitcoin pumpkin turned out well so I just left him to it. When I heard an “oh no” coming from the kitchen I knew it wasn’t going to be good. His entire symbol fell through and created a massive hole in the front of his pumpkin.
I quickly carved some devil horns to disguise the mishap but Dandays wasn’t feeling it. What he was feeling was what I whipped up next…
With the fresh pumpkins in the air I decided to cook up a butternut squash disguised as french fries.
Using my handy dandy scraper from the pumpkin carving kit I cleaned out all of the seeds and goop. This is my first time working with a butternut squash so the entire process was interesting to me. Like a meat head I peeled the skin, which is quite thick and unnecessary for those that will re create this dish.
Then I chopped the squash into the shape of french fries.
With my oven preheating at 425F, I tossed half the squash in olive oil, black pepper and pink himalayan salt. Then I I did the same to the other half but using cumin, garlic powder, chili powder, salt and pepper.
With those roasting I quickly chopped up two potatoes, one sweet and the other golden, then some broccoli.
I love broccoli. In under 5 minutes I’m mixing the potatoes and broccoli with a tinge of olive oil, pink Himalayan salt, black pepper and wrapping in foil to roast in the oven with the squash fries- about 35 minutes!
Keep an eye on those fries, they aren’t going to crisp up the way potatoes do. I pulled mine out 5 minutes before I pulled the potatoes and brocc out.
Yum 😋 so good! With this 5 minute intermission, I threw together some arugula (😉 Thanks @plantstoplanks for inspiring this arugula craze in my house), red onion and walnuts tossed in a balsamic, Italian seasoned and honey homemade dressing and let it sit in the refrigerator until the bake was done.
This is what resulted. I had a jar of homemade tomato sauce from the other night so dolloped a couple spoonfuls ontop of the bake and plated everything up. It turned out to be such a good dinner because it was whipped up in such a boundaryless way. Both @Dandays and I were satisfied and satiated.
Now, if I only had roasted those seeds at the same time I would have been a true genius. I guess there’s always room for improvement.
Thank you for visiting! Happy #fruitsandveggiesmonday folks.
Pura Vida ✌️