Pumpkin Party – Making The Most Of Your Scary Orange Friends

Pumpkin Party – Making The Most Of Your Scary Orange Friends

Pumpkin Time

Pumpkins create ALOT of waste

As it is October I thought we would talk about Halloween, well pumpkins mainly.  A few weeks away and already people are selling 100’s of pumpkins. With 2021 only being marginally more exciting than 2020, no doubt people are looking forward to having something in their calendar

Not so, Fun pumpkin fact: 1.3 billion pounds of pumpkins in America  go to landfill

I found an article that states that last year in the UK 24 million pumpkins were bought and about half of them, 12.8 million were thrown away. That is a huge amount of food waste for a one day festival. 95% of pumpkins are purchased to be carved and thrown away. They may not be plastic but it is certainly single use.

What can you do with a pumpkin though, apart from carve it? We’ve listed a few ideas below.

Things to do with pumpkins to cut down on waste

1. Compost your Pumpkin

If you have a home compost, just cut up what’s left and it will be a nice tasty treat for your compost life.

If you don’t, you may be able to fit it in your own food bin. Do make an effort to not put in in the black bin, sending something that will break down naturally to be sealed in landfill is just pointless.

2. Leave out for the night life

Chopping up into bite size pieces could be a nice tasty snack for the squIrrels, badgers or foxes passing by. 

I also read that they are not good for hedgehogs so maybe leave slightly elevated to make it harder for the wee hodge heg to get to.

Here is some information from the RSPCA

3. Use the seeds to bake a snack

Keep them and be delighted.

When carving your pumpkin separate the seeds and the flesh.

We put ours in a deep dish, a cast iron one, into the oven for 20mins. With a little oil and Salt. Approx 200c. Keep an eye though, they burn quick.

4. Mini Pumpkin Pies

We made a puree from the flesh of the pumpkin. We separated the seeds from flesh when carving and cooked the flesh in a saucepan until soft and gave it a whizz in the blender.

We added eggs, coconut milk, sugar, butter and cinnamon to make the pie filling.

The cases we made from almond flour, butter, eggs and sugar or sweetener. We blind baked the cases in silicone cup cakes cases.

Once these had started to go brown we added the pumpkin puree to the cases and returned to oven for about 10mins.

We made this recipe up, they are keto pies, here is one similar.

This one is the pastry for the pies we made: Also keto, you can find the pastry recipe here.

Give these ideas a go this year and make your pumpkin go that little but further.

The main pic featured are ours from 2020, meet Eric and Derek. Happy Carving.

You can follow us on @nowasteliving on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

If you would like to join our newsletter you can sign up by clicking this link and entering your email address.

We send out a newsletter every two weeks and it varies from eco tips, zero waste hacks, food waste, living more with less, recipes, food miles, saving money and so much more.

Comments

Submit a Comment

*" id="author" name="author" type="text" value="" size="30" maxlength="245" aria-required='true' required='required' />

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.