March 27, 2022

One of my favourite things – Pumpkins!

I like pumpkins! While some people think they are just cattle food, here in Australia we have an absolutely delicious range of pumpkins for the table.

I only have to think about the wonderful crispy caramelized edge on roasted pumpkin and I will start salivating!   

Most of the time I have pumpkin on my shopping list. They are full of seeds and so it is not surprising that quite often I will have pumpkin plants appearing in the vegie garden after I have dug in some compost. I allow one or two to grow as the plants take up a lot of room, but I train them to run up and down outside of the actual garden.  

Here are a couple that have grown so far this year. Butternut is a great variety with firm flesh and a lovely sweet taste. They are golden yellow when they are ripe.

Kent pumpkin is a softer variety and is great roasted. This particular one that I grew was quite large (garlic clove for comparison). Thankfully I have plenty of friends who happily took a good sized piece each so that it wasn’t wasted, as it is not a long-lasting variety once it is cut.

We even have our own Aussie heirloom pumpkin – the Queensland Blue, which grows in the sub-tropics. I have never grown one of those as they are HUGE and would feed an army!

The bonus is that pumpkins are good for you, so it is win-win when something that tastes great also has benefits for your health!

I seem to like using pumpkins in my craft too and they have featured in a few of my projects over the years.



I think I better stop writing and go and cook myself some pumpkin!

Val



2 comments:

simplestitches said...

I'm a pumpkin fan too!
love all of your work with pumpkins, especially that lovely yellow one second from the end of the photos.
can't beat roast pumpkin!

FlourishingPalms said...

How interesting! I didn't know there were so many varieties of pumpkins! And, as I'm most accustomed to scraping pumpkin from the inside of a can, I'm not even familiar with roast pumpkin. It must be delicious if you enjoy it so much. It's great to see them in your designs too. You make each one look unique, as they are! Thanks for your informative post!