What can I do with yesterday’s pumpkins?

[PyjamaMamma]

Other than bin it? Can you eat them? They were carved yesterday and only outside for a couple of hours, with LED candles inside, so seems quite wasteful to just throw them out. Our council does have a food waste collection but I was just wondering if there were other uses. The seeds will be roasted.

I leave mine in our local forest for the wildlife.

Chop them up and roast the shit out of them - even the wateriest pumpkin will roast up nicely when covered with oil, salt, pepper, warm spices if you have them. You don't have to peel them, once they are roasted you can scoop out the flesh from the shell.

Then you can make
gnocchi (mix with cold mashed potatoes)
soup (can add red lentils and coriander to bulk out)
pumpkin cinnamon loaf (this recipe is the best: smittenkitchen.com/2016/10/pumpkin-bread/)
pumpkin cheesecake (and other lovely recipes: smittenkitchen.com/recipes/vegetable/winter-squash/pumpkin/?format=list)
or my favourite, mix with chickpeas and tahini sauce and minced red onion and fresh coriander (food52.com/recipes/26165-moro-s-warm-squash-chickpea-salad-with-tahini)

We have a lot of land so I hack ours up into pieces and drop them into the woodland at the bottom. Animals eat it, worms love and it we compost down there anyway.

If you don't fancy this in your own garden, you could take the bits down into wooded areas near you or down to near the railway line etc.

I think I saw Kirsty Alsop hang her old ones from trees, with the seeds inside, as a bird feeder. Eventually rots though!

Did you use all of the innards to make a pie or soup? If there's any flesh left to scoop / saw off, roast it in the oven until it's bubbling and smells sweet and then into a pot with onion, garlic, stock and bay. If you don't have enough, top it up with carrot, butternut squash and / or potato. You can't eat the outside though; too tough.

We got 6 litres of soup out of ours this year which is in the freezer for bonfire night. Seeds for the birds and the rest is for the wildlife / worm food.

Also, we're lighting ours again tonight and every night until they're scabby. No sense in just doing it for one night IMHO.

If they are OK, slice in half, roast upside down in oven. Scoop out flesh and freeze. Roasting removes a lot of liquid, concentrates the flavour usually lacking in carving pumpkins. Can be used in traditional pies, breads, scones, cakes, soups.

I give them to the chickens.

Wildlife love it, put it in the garden.

Ask on your local FB site or similar and see if anyone has cows / pigs as they apparently like them . Someone near us is going round collecting them for an animal sanctuary,

Apparently pumpkin is bad for hedgehogs, so please put it somewhere off the ground - wedged in crooks of trees etc
(I only saw this yesterday, it was news to me!)

Chop them up and roast the shit out of them
They’ve already been outside - you wouldn’t seriously eat them?!

Large ornamental pumpkins are bred to be big and hollow, they don’t have much flesh anyway, and what they do have is tasteless and watery. Because they’re not bred for eating, some can have high levels of curcubitacin (a bitter tasting chemical that’s present in vegetables of the curcubit family). If you eat them they can give you a bad tummy.

Honestly the best thing is just to accept that ornamental pumpkin isn’t for eating and chuck it in the bin. If you feel wasteful then don’t buy any next year - carve a turnip which is edible.

I would @Marelle !

Give it a wash and tuck in. 🤣🤣

(Note: I removed flesh for food long before they went outside, in my own case)

Not all pumpkins are purely ornamental btw. If you bought from a local farm, it's probably delicious!

Bad for hedgehogs, so don’t put them on the ground. Higher up for squirrels, birds etc

@GiantKitten

Apparently pumpkin is bad for hedgehogs, so please put it somewhere off the ground - wedged in crooks of trees etc (I only saw this yesterday, it was news to me!)

Thank you @GiantKitten. I had no idea pumpkins were bad for hedgehogs either. They shall be moved ASAP.

They’ve already been outside - you wouldn’t seriously eat them?!

Where do you think they grew in the first place??

They grow outside, and if you wash and then roast them I can't think of anything that would be left on there that would be bad for you?

I mean, if you're going to chuck/compost anyway, you might as well try roasting it first to see if it's any good.

I have just eaten a portion of last night's jack-o'-lantern, roasted and whizzed into thick soup/thin dhal with cumin, coriander, red lentils, onion, garlic, ginger and sinus-clearing amounts of chili flakes with a dollop of yoghurt on top - it tasted great

Where do you think they grew in the first place?
Yeah but when they grew outside they were covered in protective skin. They hadn’t been cut open and the flesh exposed to dirt and germs.

I'm definitely not disputing the hedgehog warning but mine is hibernating now.

We call her Lucy and she's my favourite garden friend.

In rhe Forest of Dean apparently they are saying don't put them out in the woods as they attract the wild boar!

If a smaller edible type that hasn't had a wax candle burning in it, definitely roast, or dice fairly small and fry followed by stew as a curry or soup ingredient. Lovely with sweet or coconutty flavours, but does need enough cooking time (worth dicing/slicing fairly small) as it needs to get properly soft

I steamed mine in the pressure cooker and then peeled it and am adding it to the dogs dinners. He loves it. It's healthy and not going to waste.

@Marelle

Where do you think they grew in the first place? Yeah but when they grew outside they were covered in protective skin. They hadn’t been cut open and the flesh exposed to dirt and germs.

You mean like potatoes, apples, tomatoes, lettuce, leeks etc? Don't you just wash them?

Leaving them in the wild can be harmful to hedgehogs.

Pumpkin gives them severe diarrhoea - at the time of year when they really need to gain weight and fat to keep warm through winter.

Well I’ve just made soup, which I’m now about to throw away. I should have just left it all out for the birds

You mean like potatoes, apples, tomatoes, lettuce, leeks etc? Don't you just wash them?
Would you chop them up, put them outside for three days, then bring them back in and eat them? The skin protects them and can preserve them for months - but once they’re cut open they start to rot. That’s why supermarket veg are sold whole with no wrapping but when they’re chopped they put them in plastic packets.

I'm scooping out all the flesh to bake dog treats with and then giving the shells to the dogs to play football with. My local petting farm accepts carved pumpkins so we'll donate some there too.

I saw a post on Facebook from an animal charity saying pumpkins are only good for wildlife when they are fresh. They were asking people not to put them in woods because the charity then has to go around collecting up all the rotten ones before they harm any animals. We're going to compost ours.

I think I will try roasting them. 2 of them are the large pumpkins from Tesco but they are not massive, the third one is a massive white skinned type.

Marelle, I wouldn’t even consider eating them if they’d been outside for 3 days, but honestly DD and I finished carving them and put them out between 4-5 last night and they were back inside by 9 - so a little longer than the couple of hours I said at the OP but not that long.