Sunday, October 31, 2010

Happy Trick or Treat Day


Those days are gone. The days of hyper anticipation. The days of creating costumes, carving pumpkins with the family..... decorating the outside of the house to scare our many trick'r treaters...
Now a days, Halloween is about roasting pumpkin seeds, admiring the creativity of parents and kids, as their little ones make it to our door, two or three at a time. All my years of kids and Halloween, I was always the one to walk the neighbourhood with our kids. I never got to stay home and hand out treats. That was daddy's job. He spent the entire day of Halloween putting up a cave, with creepy webs and eery lights, haunting sounds.. so, it just made sense that he would stay home and scare the crap out of the neighbourhood kids.
This Halloween is no different. We cleaned out the pumpkins last night (ok, the picture shows that Terry did that),
but I roasted the seeds. Out of 4 nice sized pumpkins, I got 4 cups of seeds. I like leaving the little bits of pumpkin on them.
I use to wash them off, but it made the seeds quite soggy, and by leaving the little bits on , they seem to absorb more of the butter and garlic and roast very nicely.
This time, I used left over garlic butter, and didn't add as much garlic powder to my recipe.. and they were particularly yummy. Even Terry tried them and said they were pretty good and he doesn't generally like them.
Below, you will find an oddity. In all our years of gutting pumpkins.. this was a first. There was a seed taking sprout inside the pumpkin. Very cool. Actually, Suzanne and I found a leaf spouting in an apple once too... very cool.
Another fun part of Halloween is buying the treats. I finally figured out a few years ago that there is no need to buy the treats in early Oct. They just get eaten by the pre Halloween treat testers. I now feel that I can confidently buy treats either the day of the day before Halloween. There will be lots of treats somewhere to buy. We headed out to Zellers buy my favorite treat to give out.. and that is microwave popcorn in little bags, and when you pop it, it comes out orange. We got a box of chocolate bars too, but Terry said we are not giving them out unless we really NEED to. When we were unwrapping our boxes of popcorn, Terry read on the box "Diacetyl Free". We weren't sure what that was, but it must be a good thing. Its the next thing we need to avoid I figure... if only I knew how to say it.

Wouldn't be halloween, either, without dressing someone like a lady bug. I couldn't catch Tonks... so Paralax wore it... not for very long though!

Happy Halloween Everyone..



3 comments:

GailM. said...

ahh, how cute that ladybug is. Don't worry, your trick or treating adventures will come back again. They did for me. We had lots of Halloween visitors this afternoon. They all came for Halloween Turkey. We had an angel, a pig, a blackbird, a wressler, a poodle, and a mad scientist and Cleopatra. It was fun. They're all gone now to carry on with the days festivities.

Can I have your recipe for roasted pumpkin seeds.

Mick said...

Haha I love Parallax's costume! She's such a good sport (Not like lucy haha) Happy Halloween!

Anonymous said...

Tonks has no Halloween spirit, but Parallax will do anything if she thinks she will get some ice cream out of it!
I'd love to see the pumpkins finished. I only had the one pumpkin this year, carved on Monday night to show my students, and as it was a cooking pumpkin (juicy and sugary) it went moldy by Friday morning.