Stuffed Hokkaido Pumpkin

 I first ate a stuffed Hokkaido pumpkin at my Georgian friends place. It was so delicious that I stole the recipe from her and made my own. Unfortunately it didn't taste anything as delicious as my friends. I was so sad, but I blamed it on the fact that her pumpkin was organically grown, with love, in her own garden. Thereafter I lost the recipe, but every year since then, when the shelves were brimming with Hokkaido's during the fall, I craved for a stuffed pumpkin. So for the last few years I've been experimenting with stuffing pumpkins. This year I finally perfected my recipe 😁. We've been so busy eating it that there was no time to post it! I hope you'll still have some pumpkins left on the shelf.

Preparation time: 1.5 hours; serves 2

Ingredients:

1	Organic Hokkaido pumpkin (about 20 cm diameter)
1 tsp.	Minced garlic
1/2 tsp.	Salt
1 tbsp.	Olive oil
200 g	Feta or similar (I use a cheese based on cows milk)
1/2	Vegetable cube
1/2 cup	Couscous
1/2 cup	Coarsely chopped walnuts
1/4 cup	Dried cranberries, coarsely chopped
3/4 cup	Hot water
1 tbsp.	Chopped cilantro

Method:

Pre-heat your oven to 180 C (fan oven) [200 C convection].

Cutting and cleaning out the pumpkin is probably the most time consuming and difficult part of the this recipe. You'll need a very strong and sharp knife to cut open the top. See the picture below. Take great care  while doing this. Cut the hole big enough so that you can fit your hand in later to scrape out some of the insides. 

Put the minced garlic, salt and olive oil into the pumpkin and coat the surface well. Don't forget to coat the inside of the lid. 

I've found that Hokkaido pumpkins tend to split in the oven. This is a bit annoying because one of the nice things about the dish is that it looks really good. So if it splits and falls to pieces, well what was the use? Because of this I've taken to wrapping the bottom part of the pumpkin with aluminium foil. Sometimes before I bake it and some times after. However, wrapping with foil is not essential, it's just to keep the pumpkin together. 

Put your pumpkin on a baking tray (this is essential) and bake for 15-20 minutes or until the flesh of the pumpkin is soft enough to scoop out. This will not only depend on the size of your pumpkin but also on how thick it is. 

While the pumpkin is baking you can get the other ingredients ready. Coarsely chop the walnuts and cranberries (if they are too large that is). Cube the feta cheese and finely chop the cilantro.

Once the pumpkin is baked remove it from the oven and scrape out some of the flesh (about 1/2 to 1 cup). Be careful to leave enough flesh so that the pumpkin retains it's shape. If the flesh is hard you can cut it into small cubes, if not it will just break up when you mix things together. Now place all dry ingredients in a bowl and mix. 

Pour in the hot water, mix everything together and then stuff the pumpkin with the mixture. 

Put on the lid and bake for a a further 15 minutes.

You can serve this as a side or a main dish. We like it with a bit of crusty bread and a salad.

Pumpkin fairy lights

 I wanted to make pumpkin fairy lights to light up the crochet witch that my daughter made for me, but I could not find anything I liked anywhere. I was not about to buy some lights. I'm not sure why, but that somehow didn't seem right. After raiding my craft drawers I only had to buy some paper!

You will need:

A string of 20 fairy lights 

A hole punch

20 Brads [for some reason called "sample bag clips"(Musterbeutelklammern) in Germany]

Brown play-doh or plasticine or similar substance

1 sheet 50,5 * 70 cm Orange transparent paper (Transparent-Extrastark)

Scissors

Ruler

Cellotape

Pen/pencil (maybe!)

Method:

First make a trial strip. You need to do this because the bulb has to fit through the hole that you punch. Cut a 1.5 cm by 10 cm strip of orange paper and punch a hole into the end. Check if the bulb completely passes through. I found that the wires coming out of the bulb are wider than the bulb itself so I had to squeeze them a bit to get them through the hole. If your bulb does not fit through you may have to find a hole punch with a larger hole or a smaller bulb. If you have to buy the string of fairy lights and have a hole punch at home make a hole in a thick piece of paper and take it to the store with you so you can see if the bulb fits through it. Don't forget it you make a larger hole your strips will have to be wider. Adjust accordingly. Also don't forget if your bulb goes through too easily it will also come out easily. Mine just happened to be perfect. Once I had the paper in it did not just slip out. 

Once you have the correct material cut 11 strips of orange paper per pumpkin (1.5 by 10 cm). It is not so important that the strips are exactly the same width, but it is important that they are exactly the same length (that is, for one pumpkin). Stack them and trim them if necessary.

Punch a hole in the bottom and in the top. If you have a single hole punch things will be easier, but if you don't you can use a regular hole punch. I have a single one somewhere in the house but no one seems to know where it is! When using a two hole punch you'll need to take the back off the hole punch so you can see where you are punching. Make a small dot at the place you want to be the center of the circle. Place the strip into the hole punch so that you can see the dot and then punch! You can stack a few together so things go quicker. In fact if you can punch all 11 in one go then it will be much easier for you to pass the bulb and the brad through the hole. It worked with my standard hole punch so I think it should work with most.

Pass the bulb through 11 strips of paper. The side you want to be on the outside is facing my hand in the picture. The side on the top will be inside the pumpkin. In the photo I passed one strip through, but later on I passed all 11 at the same time and to get it through the last bit I bent the paper a bit. This seemed to get it through.

And then pass a brad through the hole on the other side as shown in the picture. 

Next distribute the strips to form what looks like a Chinese lantern (at least thats what my kids think it looks like).  You may need to loosed the brad to make it easier to distribute the layers. It's easy enough to tighten it later. Squeeze it a bit to make it look more like a pumpkin. 

Take a small blob of play-doh and form the stem. You may need to hold the wires together. My wires insisted on separating so I put a small piece of tape around them to hold them together. 

And voila!! 

PS. You may need to wait for your play-doh to dry before hanging your lanterns.

2 minute spiders for Halloween

Tonight is Halloween and probably there are many more of you busy parents out there scrambling to find quick decorations. So I'm sharing the spiders I just made. Of course if you can make them in 2 minutes they are not going to be very detailed, however the effect is there.

For a basic spider all you need is 4 black, long pipe cleaners.

Bend the pipe cleaners in half to identify the middle

and then twist in the middle twice to secure the cleaners together.

Next take a "leg" from the right hand side and bend it diagonally over to the left hand side. Do this with all legs moving them from left to right and right to left. This will form the body of the spider.

Next bend the legs down in the middle to a 90 degree angle and then bend the bottom to 90 degrees in the opposite direction (up). Viola... you have a spider.

If you have googly eyes stick a couple on each leg and if you like tie a thread to the middle so that the spider can be suspended from her web.