First of all, to make sure you’re reading this with the right voice in your head, this is Mike not Nichelle. Yes, yes, I apparently am still a part of this blog despite the pastel color scheme. As you may or may not know, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and I tend to go a bit overboard each year, at least in terms of how much we should be able to afford.
A few days ago I was at the grocery store and finally bought two good sized pumpkins. Nichelle has been making me wait a few weeks now, and good thing because they were only 19 cents a pound! Not too shabby! We’ll be carving those soon enough. Earlier today I needed to go to the grocery store and what did I see? Pumpkins for only 9 cents a pound! (This was at Macey’s for all those in Provo.) Since I was there alone there was no stopping me from procuring a 25 pound pumpkin and taking it home.
While Nichelle was at work I had the pleasure of gutting the beast and smoothing out the interior. As a side note, a really nice tool for the inside of a pumpkin is the spoon-type thing that comes with a rice cooker (see below).
Another tip I came up with today. You know how pumpkin stems have all those little prickly things on them? Well, I just grabbed a small piece of sand paper and rubbed it down! Now it’s smooth as a baby’s bottom.
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Nichelle found a good stencil online and we decided to carve it up tonight. Nichelle traced the stencil onto the pumpkin via poking little holes through the paper with a push pin. Afterward I got to go through and cut it all out. Being a larger pumpkin there was a very thick flesh to the pumpkin which made it fairly difficult to get through. But after not much time, and no bodily harm, we had a mighty fine lookin’ Jack-o-lantern!
