The above picture is our house on Halloween.  I couldn’t get a really good picture, but, those eyes are in the upstairs windows.  The lights are hanging from our front veranda. 

Normally, I like to write about my successes in the kitchen, I mean, what’s the point of talking about my failures?   After we carved pumpkins, Paul wanted me to roast the pumpkin seeds.  So for hours I pulled seeds out of the pumpkin innards.  Yuckie.  But, I got a ton of seeds.  I grow my own pumpkins and my goal is to get a 1000 pound pumpkin someday.  Each year my pumpkins get bigger and bigger and by regular old pumpkins size, mine are pretty big.  But, they are by no means giant.  This year I think my biggest pumpkin was about 100 pounds.  Paul says it wasn’t that heavy. 

But, as he and Kye struggled to carry the pumpkin from the garden to the house, I asked him if it was heavier than one of our dogs.  He thought it was much heavier.  Well, our heaviest dog is close to 100 pounds!  Of course, once I pointed that out, he said the reason they were struggling to move the pumpkin was the fact there was nothing to “grab” on to.  He said the skin of the pumpkin was slippery and blah blah blah.  So, folks, I say the pumpkin was at LEAST 100 pounds and I am sticking to it!

Needless to say, with such a big pumpkin comes really big pumpkin seeds.  Each spring I buy the “Dill” pumpkin seeds.  Supposedly, these are the seeds that grow giant pumpkins.  Obviously, it is not working for me, because I only grow big pumpkins, but, the seeds are really really big.  So you would think that you would have super roasted seeds.  Well, not so much. 

Now how difficult is it to roast pumpkin seeds?  It isn’t.  Melt some butter, put your seeds in the melted butter, spread the seeds on a cookie sheet, add a bit of salt and pop in the oven until done.  Easy, right?  Well, that is unless your seeds start popping like popcorn!  Yup.  I was sitting in the dining room and all of a sudden I heard “pop.”  I thought that odd, but, then I heard another “pop” and another and another and all of a sudden it was if I was popping corn not seeds.  I quickly got some tin foil and placed over the seeds, to see if that would stop them popping all over the oven.  Well, it did, sorta.  I continued to hear the popping, but, now it was staying under the foil.  Eventually, I had to pull the seeds out of the oven, and I could see that they were not properly roasted.  They were still undone.  I tasted one and immediately spit it out.  Yuck!  Of course, the seeds that landed on the oven floor were burnt, and they smelled that “lovely” burnt smell. 

Fortunately, they were easy to clean off the floor of the oven, but, the seeds could only be thrown away.  I think the problem was they were just too big.  Instead of roasting they popped.  And that was not a good thing.  So no roasted pumpkin seeds this year.  I took a huge bowl out to the compost bin, we shall see where the birds and squirrels plant them.  Next year I should have volunteer pumpkin plants coming up all over the yard.  Some years I just let them grow and other years I pull them.  The funny thing is, the volunteer pumpkins always do better than the ones I sow.  Cool how that works, isn’t it?

This is my largest pumpkin.  It is difficult to see how big it is, but, trust me it is at least two feet tall.