BOOM, ROASTED
It's been roughly a month since the last time I wrote here and things, unfortunately, have not really improved.
from a good day, on a hay ride
Over the past month I have struggled with wanting to blog more but being stymied by my current situation. I don't think people want to read very long passages about how isolated I (still) feel or how sad I (still) am most days. I am also a little scared of being that honest all the time, because I'm still looking for a job and, like it or not, most potential employers are probably not excited to interview The Sad Girl Who Misses North Carolina And Wears Sweatpants A Lot. (Though I probably wouldn't miss North Carolina so much while wearing sweatpants if you'd hire me, you know?)
But despite all of that I do want to write, so you know what I'm going to write about today? MOTHERFUCKING PUMPKIN SEEDS, THAT'S WHAT.
AW, SHIT.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that I roasted some goddamn pumpkin seeds and they were delicious. The other is that now, when someone says, "You have a blog? What's it about?" I can very definitively say, "I don't know, really, but it is definitely not a food blog."
here is some corn that I did not cook but that I did eat
It's not that there is anything wrong with food blogs; I actually get most of my recipes from them. But the genre has evolved from a way to share really delicious recipes to this whole other thing where you first have to write seven cutesy paragraphs about how you tripped over a tomato and it inspired you to make ratatouille, followed by dozens of photos of vegetables in various stages of "sliced."
That ridiculousness got worse this year when, for some reason, foodie internet - eh, really the internet in general - lost its goddamn collective mind over the earth-shattering concept of "seasons," specifically "fall."
Maybe my tolerance is lower this year because everything in my life right now is so generally exhausting? Maybe it's just me, and everyone else actually needed other people to proclaim to them, loudly, in all caps and via hashtags, that IT IS FALL, YALL! And in FALL (YALL) you can WEAR A SCARF and PICK SOME APPLES and EAT A SHIT TON OF PUMPKIN AND SQUASH!
OMFG PUMPKINS (ok but I do like this photo)
To hear the internet tell it, all anyone is doing from Labor Day to Thanksgiving is bundling up in wool to sit in the pumpkin patch and eat acorn-squash waffles, washed down with disgusting pumpkin-spice lattes, hashtag-sweater-weather. I understand the enthusiasm generally because fall is my favorite season, but it happens every year (seasons! who knew! like clockwork!), and every filtered photo of a gourd on a porch step makes me want to die just a little more.
But! Even I am not totally immune. Because even I spent a day roasting some motherfucking pumpkin seeds.
Per the rules of living in 2017, I must give you a detailed run-down of that, and that's OK because it was the first time I had ever roasted pumpkin seeds and I was pretty excited about how good they were. But lest you think this is at all serious: it is not. There is no "recipe" (because they are just some goddamn pumpkin seeds). There are a lot of swear words. Consider yourselves warned.
Tradition dictates that I relate this experience back to my childhood or some other meaningful memory, so here is an emotional conversation that I had with my dad after Brandon and I carved the pumpkin that birthed the seeds that I then roasted:
Really brings a tear to your eye, no?
Anyway since I had never done this shit before my main concern was how to separate the seeds from the pumpkin guts. Pumpkin innards are all slimy and stringy and they smell damp and weird and I was not excited to spend an entire afternoon painstakingly raking my hands through them to extract the seeds. (Why do this when I could instead spend an entire afternoon photographing food in multiple locations with slightly different lighting?) However it turns out that if you just plop that shit into a big bowl of water the seeds more or less separate themselves. FOOD MAGIC. Water giveth life, indeed.
You just let them kind of float around with their guts for awhile, stirring with a spoon occasionally while thinking about how gross they are, and then you strain the whole mess in a colander and manually pick apart the stubborn little shits that didn't separate on their own. (You can mutter "little shits" under your breath while you do this if you want to. I won't judge you.)
After you rinse them there will still be some little pumpkin-gut stragglers because some mothers have a hard time cutting the apron strings, but they'll go away in the next step, which is to plop the whole pile into a pot of boiling water. The water gets rid of the pumpkin shreds and softens the outside of the seeds for more even roasting or easier digestion or something. Look, I don't know. Google told me to boil them for 15 minutes, so that's what I did.
pumpkin-seed time machine
Actually, it was probably more like 20 minutes because I set a timer and then got a glass of wine and wandered away. When I remembered to come back to the stove, I strained those suckers again and then sort of patted them dry haphazardly with a paper towel before spreading them on a cookie sheet. Then I threw some olive oil, salt, black pepper and garlic powder on there and mixed that shit around until it was evenly covered.
(By the way, I own nice gold-toned roasting pans but decided to use this smaller cheap cookie sheet because the charred look adds an air of authenticity to my photos. "I HAVE COOKED BEFORE," it proclaims. "BEHOLD MY ASHY EVIDENCE.")
Next, I threw that pan in the oven for basically forever. The internet told me to roast them at 325 for 20 minutes, stirring once in the middle, but that was crap advice because mine weren't crispy or even slightly roasted or delicious after 20 minutes. I think these seeds were legit in my oven for at least an hour, and I stirred them about six times, and I added more spices every time I stirred them because I like lots of flavor and also because I'd had a second glass of wine by then and found much culinary delight in shaking the various powders over the sheet. (FIND YOUR JOY. LIVE YOUR TRUTH.)
Approximately four years later the seeds were done. Of course, before we could actually eat them, I had to take the bowl of seeds outside to sit amongst some artfully arranged leaves and their mother pumpkin for this completely nonsensical photo.
They were delicious - crunchy and garlicky and peppery and salty - but I don't know if that's a valid opinion or if it's because we had waited like six hours for these pumpkin seeds to cook and would have eaten just about anything by then.
Here, by the way, is our jack-o-lantern. We used a pattern from a pumpkin-carving magazine from the 1970s. His mouth is a bat, his eyebrows are brooms, his eyeballs are pumpkins (meta), his nose is a witch's hat and his ears are cats. (HIS EARS ARE CATS!) The result is the derpiest jack-o-lantern in the history of the world, and I could not have loved him more, even though he got infested with fruit flies two days later and I had to throw him away.
He's like, "Hey guys just wondering if I could have some of those pumpkin seeds maybe," and I'm like, "No, Frank, it took me 16 hours to roast those and also, THEY'RE YOUR CHILDREN."
The end. If this post inspires you to roast yourself some pumpkin seeds, please don't tag me on Instagram. I'm happy for you and everything, but I just don't really care that much.