Roasting Pumpkin Seeds (Cooking with Pumpkin)

2011-10-06 595

Roasting Pumpking Seeds (Cooking with Pumpkin) - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Another thing I love about Fall is I love to eat roasted pumpkin seeds. So when you carve your Jack-O-Lantern or if you roast a small pumpkin like this to make something, bake something you want to save all of those seeds. What you are going to do is you will scoop out your pumpkin pulp with the seeds. So to dry them you put them in the collander, you have removed all the excess liquid and you can lay them flat out on a baking sheet and put them out, under the hot sun to speed up the process but you want them to be totally dried out before you put them in the oven. So what you want to do then with the pumpkin seeds is, you are going to lie them out on a baking sheet. I like to melt a couple of tablespoons of butter, depending on how many seeds I have and very simply just add salt. You do not have to do anything else to this recipe. And what is great about pumpkin seeds is they are free. They are going to come inside that carved Jack-O-Lantern that you have, so instead of throwing them away after you have carved your pumpkin save them and it makes a delicious, healthy snack. High in fiber. Of course I am adding butter which is going to give you the calories but it is going to give it a lot of great flavor. So I highly recommend using a very little bit of butter when you roast your pepita pumpkin seeds. This is how pumpkin seeds look when they are whole. You can buy these year round this way and very inexpensive in Mexican markets called pepitas and it is the whole pumpkin seed. That is how it looks when it is different. Now another way that you can do pumpkin seeds if you have them like this during the year. It is not pumpkin season and you want to have pumpkin seeds roasted. You can either roast these in the oven but another quicker way is to put them in a non-stick skillet with a little pan spray and within a minute or two they are going to turn this beautiful color. These are great as a garnish on top of any types of baked goods. Pumpkin bread, pumpkin cookies, they are really wonderful.