Don’t Bin Your Pumpkin Flesh
Don't waste the pumpkin flesh when making your Halloween lanterns etc.
The flesh can be cooked and eaten, and the seeds can be cleaned, dried, then roasted with a bit of olive oil to sprinkle on soups and salads.
Emily Gussin has great ideas of what to do with pumpkins in her book, Don't Waste Your Pumpkin.
You may also see other pumpkins, squashes and gourds such as Butternut, Acorn, Kabocha etc and if you haven't tried them, they can make a really delicious dinner. One of our favourites is Crown Prince which is blue-grey skinned with dense, sweetly flavourful orange flesh.
See the following recipes from BBC Good Food for four different pumpkin recipes - cake, soup, curry and pie.
Pumpkin Cake
Pumpkin Soup
Pumpkin Curry
Pumpkin Pie
It is so important not to waste food. Everything we eat has a carbon footprint from the farmer sowing the seeds, possibly using pesticides, watering the crop, then harvesting and transporting to the shops.
Please do try one of the above recipes to use up the flesh from the pumpkins when making your Halloween lanterns.
Over a quarter of all pumpkins are thrown away each year, 18,000 tonnes.
Every year in UK we waste 7.3 million tonnes of food and drink that cost the average family £800 !! Food that goes to landfill produces methane gas which is 20 times more damaging to our climate than Carbon dioxide.
Please eat your pumpkin, or put it on your compost heap, cut up, or put it in a food waste bin if your Council has a food waste collection scheme.