Carving Jack-O-Lanterns

Prep time: Minimal

Activity time:  30 minutes

I carved my first Jack-O-Lantern in nearly 30 years this month.  After our trip to the pumpkin patch (see previous blog post “Our Long Island pumpkin patch adventure”) we bought a couple of carving tools in the farm’s store for under $3 each.  The boys decided they wanted to make a silly face (Zach) and a scary face (Elijah).  

I drew the designs on a piece of paper first, asking the boys for a lot of direction (What shape should the eyes be?  Do we want to add a nose?  How can we make the eyebrows scary!?)  Meanwhile, my husband was working on scooping out all the pumpkin guts to save for making toasted pumpkin seeds and pumpkin soup.

When we had a good idea of how we wanted our jack-o-lanterns to look, I handled the cutting. We had safety “knives” but the kids weren’t able to push hard enough to cut through the thick pumpkins.  Instead, once I had a feature fully cut, they helped me to push the item out of the pumpkin.  We had a lot more success pushing from the inside-out.  Another tip: I learned the hard way NOT to use a sharpie to draw the outline of the various face elements.  Translating the flat drawing to the spherical pumpkin surface proved a little tricky.  I ended up with the mouth way lower than I intended.  This may have been my severe lack of practice in pumpkin carving, but as a relatively well coordinated woman, well-versed in drawing simple faces, I was surprised at the utter mess I made with Take 1 with the sharpie.  However, we just turned the pumpkin around and tried again on the “new” front side. 

For Take 2, I carved the pumpkin’s features free hand.  This time, starting with the mouth to make sure I had it properly in position.  Next I did the eyes and eyebrows and worked my way toward the center of the face.  We scraped off the bits of shredded pumpkin falling into the path of our cut-outs inside the pumpkin, lit a candle inside the hollowed out pumpkin, and were amazed with our results!

Boo!

As for my husband’s side cooking project – the pumpkin soup turned out amazingly well!  Mike separated out the seeds for toasting with a little salt and put the pumpkin guts into a large pot.  He added milk, Splenda, salt, pepper, cinnamon and assorted spices and cooked until the pumpkin had softened.  We used an emulsion blender to make it all smooth texture (though you could scoop the liquid into a regular blender) and saved what we didn’t eat that day in plastic containers to freeze for Thanksgiving.