Keep a ghoul head
Pumpkin pie powder and salt for a mouth-watering savoury snack or stirred into molten salt caramel for a sticky toffee sweet with a hint of Halloween.
If you mould this into globes and pop in wooden kebab sticks, you will have the perfect offering for neighbourhood trick-or-treaters too.
The seeds of the Kakai variety are particularly good for eating as they have no hard outer shell, unlike other varieties. So if you’re carving one of these, be sure not to miss out.
You can also use the flesh of the pumpkin to make tasty food.
Favourites in my household include pumpkin soup with crushed garlic, carrots and smoky bacon for seeing off the chill after an autumn walk.
We also love spiced pumpkin loaf with fragrant cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger as an accompaniment to an afternoon cuppa by the fire.
You can also make gingerbread and pumpkin biscuits iced with creepy designs. Or why not try the American classic, pumpkin pie, served with vanilla ice-cream, for a tasty after dinner treat?
Either buy a pumpkin specifically for cooking or make use of the flesh of your Jack O’lantern – the stringy innards are not enough on their own to give your home-cooking that distinctive pumpkin punch.
Some pumpkins are better for eating than others, so bear this in mind.
Larger pumpkins tend to have less flavour than smaller ones and those with stringy flesh are not as pleasant to eat.
The Sweet Sugar Pie and Red Warty Thing varieties have fine-textured sweet flesh that is ideal for baking into Pop lanterns on your step pies and biscuits. Cinderella and Fairytale pumpkins are the shape of Cinderella’s carriage and have thick, ribbed rinds.
This makes them hard to turn into Jack O’lanterns but fantastic in soups and breads.
So if you don’t fancy carving your own lantern, use them as decorations and eat them later.
For ornamental pumpkins that make for incredible home cooking, choose the dead man’s blue of Crown Prince or the other-worldly fruit of the Turk’s Turban variety.
If kept at a cool room temperature, pumpkins will keep for months. Seeds to feed hungry little monsters