Do you cook your pumpkin seeds? If you don’t, mail them to me! I’m serious! I love them! And being gluten free, dairy free, soy free, and nut free, pumpkin seeds end up being a great portable snack. Too bad we only get them once a year (which makes me wonder can you freeze them?)! We carved our pumpkins last night but I didn’t roast the seeds yet because I was trying to remember how I made some delicious BBQ flavored pumpkin seeds last year (I didn’t think I wrote down my recipe). In a last ditch effort, I decided to look in a folder with old recipes for the blog that I haven’t touched in about a year -guess what! It’s here! I’m super excited so these seeds are actually in the oven as we speak!
A little about our pumpkin carving experience…per usual, dad got super into the carving, planning out his pumpkin for days (or maybe just the day of but still), Mom just wings it (because what mom has time to plan their pumpkin carving. and the LO was not into it at all. Like not even for a minute. When we first started carving and cleaning out the pumpkins I thought there might be hope because he came over and wanted to help me. “Knife” he said….yeah, that’s all he cared about because once he found out that I wasn’t going to give him the knife he walked into the other room, grabbed a box full of toy animals, walked back over to me and dumped them all over the ground next to me (so there mom, if you don’t let me use the knife then I’ll make an absolute mess). I tried to substitute his knife with his toy saw (an even showed him that it could cut through the pumpkin) but no, not good enough. Anyways, he wasn’t into the carving but he did get really into the fact that both mom and dad were on the ground in the kitchen (something that doesn’t ever happen). Then, while carving the last pumpkin I was able to get him to talk me though carving it. What shapes do you want the eyes? “Triangle”, he said. “What about the nose?”….”Octonaut”….Yes, out of all of the shapes, my LO is obsessed with octagons. Cracks me up! Just in case you’re wondering, octagons are hard to carve….see below.
(Promise to get you our pumpkin picture soon 🙂 Too busy now getting ready to Trick or Treat!)
But, not matter how crappy your pumpkin carving looks – the seeds will taste great if you follow this recipe!
BBQ Pumpkin Seeds
I use this for every 2-3 cups of pumpkin seeds
Ingredients:
1 t brown sugar
1/4 t chili powder
1/2 t paprika
1/2 t garlic salt
1/2 t onion powder
1/4 t salt
Preheat your oven to 300 degrees. Place your cleaned and rinsed seeds on a baking sheet and roast for 30 minutes or so, until partially dry. Mix all of the ingredients above together. Take your seeds out of the oven, stir, and toss with the seasoning. Put back into the oven and roast for 20-30 minutes longer. Enjoy! Happy Halloween!
[…] delicious. I make them plain to top salads, or salted to snack on. Want a BBQ version? Check out my BBQ Roast Pumpkin Seeds which can easily be adapted to use winter squash […]