Fifty 7 Ninety: Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

I love Halloween! An excuse to get creative and have stockpiles of candy in the home? Sign me up! This year, I decided to try new things.

Instead of my usual PG costume choice (most recently Little Red Riding Hood, Audrey Hepburn, & Wilma Flintstone), I wanted to play with costume makeup and go scarier. I decided to be Jigsaw from those ridiculously twisted Saw movies. Creepy, right?? I had a very glamorous image in mind of mixing scary with sexy, complete with a dramatic smoky eye. My makeup guru, Sarah, did a spooky look for her blog HERE that I was using as partial inspiration. But that went down the drain when I grabbed a cheap tube of white face paint. I have never done Halloween makeup before and I learned an important lesson: you get what you pay for. My white face was stiff, cracked, uncomfortable, and not at all pretty. Real eyeshadows wouldn't blend with it, so I had to stick to costume makeup for the entire look. I wiped it all off and reapplied three times before I ran out of time and gave up. So no, you don't get a picture of that costume. But it was fun and different!

My second new Halloween decision was to carve something unique and different into my pumpkin instead of sticking with the usual stencils of bats and jack-o-lantern faces. So a quick google search later, combined with my Breaking Bad withdrawals, produced THIS. Easy enough! I'm super excited about my new Heisenberg pumpkin!

The third new thing is much simpler: roasting pumpkin seeds. I've never done it. I know, ridiculous. So I went to trusty Pinterest and found this pin for OneLittleProject.com. She made it sound so easy, and she was right! So here goes:

First, get your hands dirty. Separate the seeds from the goop by any means necessary: rake, squeeze, shake...your call. It's time consuming but oddly relaxing. I'll be very impressed if you get ALL the seeds. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Next, rinse the seeds well in a colander. They will still feel slimy but they will be clean. Remove the leftover clumps of pumpkin that you missed earlier.

In a bowl, add 2 tablespoons of oil, and salt to taste. Mix it up to coat the seeds evenly.

Spread the seeds onto a baking pan. You want to try to get them in a single layer as much as possible, or they might clump together during baking. Bake at 325 degrees for 40-45 minutes. Be sure to stir it up once during baking, and try to settle them into a single layer again afterward.