Okay, I bought a nice pumpkin today, or it would have been nice except my mom was ignoring her driving and had to stand on the brakes when I got hysterical about the deer on a collision course with the front end of the car. The pumpkin is a casualty, the stem is knocked off and it tore the hide off as well. Rotting is soon to set in.

So what do I do with it now? Is it any good as rabbit feed?

I haven't heard much positive about canning it for pie filling, and it's more than I think I can get away with in pumpkin casserole for the time being.

Bake it and freeze it?

What do any of you do with your Day of the Dead jack-o-lanterns?

-- Anonymous, September 09, 2001

Answers

try covering the rip with plastic wrap and keep it in a fridge until use. Then stick two rubber eyeballs and some vampire fangs in it if its groady enough and make a "crypt master" jack o lantern.

-- Anonymous, September 09, 2001

Julie, sorry about your Great Pumpkin casualty!!!

Most animals relish fresh pumpkin, my horses eat it, the chickens really love it, and the rabbits will eat it, some of them anyway!!! Just be sure for the large animals that you slice it up so they cannot choke on any pieces the try to eat whole, the piggies!

We raise enough pumpkin to decorate the entire farm with Jack-o- lanterns every where, after their "time" is done, they are doled out to the animals before they go to rotting.

Unless it is a pie pumpkin, it will not be good for people food, would be way too bland and no flavor at all. Pie pumpkins are very small and have that traditional sweet taste we expect from pumpkin, Jack-o-lanterns are just good for animal food, they are less fussy about their taste requirements than us humans!!!

-- Anonymous, September 09, 2001

Yeah, Julie, try some on the horses -- cut it in long fingers and put it through the slicer like you do the carrots. If Speedy were still with us, I bet she'd eat it. The only veggie I tried on her that she refused was [iceberg] lettuce.

Although I really like Jay's idea, I think it wouldn't last until Halloween.

-- Anonymous, September 09, 2001

The rubber eyeballs are really cool to do. We did it once and made "sockets" for them so that I could turn the eyes with fishing line run in the window ike a puppet when the kids got to looking at it. The big bloodshot ones look the nastiest :>) Something else we did once but it wore me out was when I "corpsed out" and let them hang me from a big hickory tree with a a repeling body harness and fake noose. When the kids got their candy and started looking at me, I'd open my eyes wide and laugh like I was being tickled when one would touch me to see if I was real. That night we had freinds standing guard to keep them out of the street as they broke the sound barrier :>)

-- Anonymous, September 09, 2001

I'm afraid that the pumpkin won't last another six weeks, even if I did have refrigerator room (at the moment, it's being stuffed with vegetables Ihave to get around to processing. Of course.). I think I will try baking some of it as an experiment anyway, figuring that at least the baking will concentrate the flavour some (one could hope). And I might as well try it on the critters and see how it goes too.

I've cooked jack o'lantern pumpkins (field pumpkins, whatever you want to call them) before and eaten them and I didn't think they were spectacular, but edible. I had one that was really good, had an extremely thick wall like a pie pumpkin, but it had to have weighed at least 15 if not 20 lbs. Maybe it was crossbred. Well, if it isn't too stringy, I'll give it a try.

Doggone it, I'm sorry that I don't live closer to you, Jay! You're my kind of partier! I have huge boxes full of Halloween preparations that I add to every year. I did something sort of similar to the kids one year, utilizing a paper-mache skull mask that I'd made. The previous year I'd had it propped up in a corner and the kids were all pretty blaise to smartass about it, so the next year I wore it, and once they figured that it was the same dummy as the year before, I'd stand up.

I had eight kids go off the porch at top velocity, screaming into the night, not to return that year. The only problem is that word has gotten around about the house and that means more kids every year.

I've even begun work already on some things for this year.

-- Anonymous, September 10, 2001

Those deer pop out at the worst times. My mother-in-law makes something with thinly sliced pumkin and cornmeal. I don't like it but my husband loves it. I'll see if I can get the receipe for you. Too bad you don't have pigs. When I had them, they went crazy for pumkin, even after it was carved and lit with a candle all night.

PS The zucchini fairy finally paid me a visit with three large ones. Yea

-- Anonymous, September 10, 2001