Elsie has a thing about pumpkins.  She used to grow all kinds of strange ones, but nowadays it’s just Crown Prince for roasting and Lady Godiva for the seeds.  And I’ve been meaning to do this post for a fortnight now …

That’s a few Lady Godivas which have been opened in the traditional way i.e. by the application of a clean spade, and from which Elsie has extracted most of the seeds.  They’re all slimy and horrible when you pull them out of the flesh, so the next step is to wash them and get all the gloop off, after which they look like the ones in that colander to the right of the picture above.

And that’s what they look like after a few days spread out in the sun, still with their very delicate outer skin which tends to fall off.

Now, just in case there’s somebody out there who’s not familiar with them, I should perhaps explain why we go to all this trouble to end up with a couple of storage jars full of dried home-grown organic pumpkin seeds.  It is because they are scrummy.  Very scrummy, in fact.  And no doubt very good for you too, at least until somebody somewhere sooner or later announces that eating them increases the incidence of St Vitus Dance in vegans with ginger hair and a lisp, so we should all avoid wacky stuff like this and just eat crap from supermarkets like normal people do.

Meanwhile, we chuck a small handful in a small frying pan, put a lid on it to stop them jumping out, turn the gas up full under it, and keep shaking the pan until the seeds have just about stopped popping (as in popcorn, more or less).  We then take the lid off, tip the toasted seeds out, let them cool just a bit until they no longer burn the mouth, then scoff the lot between us.

There – a post about pumpkins, and not a word about Linus van Pelt, The Great Pumpkin and sincerity.

OK, that’s pumpkins done.  Next up is probably going to be Oiling Your Vintage Singer Part 2, with particular reference to the Singer 99K, but it might be something about the strange aluminium feet.

Who knows?