We harvested some huge pumpkins from the garden recently. The best part? We didn’t intentionally grow these! When we lived in Sydney we had pumpkin vines spring up randomly almost every summer but we never got pumpkins.
Harvest the pumpkins
It’s likely that these came from the worm castings that we mix in to the soil. Our busy worms in the worm farm lap up all the veggie scraps we feed them and give us … huge pumpkins! I just love the circularity of it.
This gives an indication of their size - no that is not a giant apple!
The worst thing about pumpkin - prepping the pumpkin
We’ve used up one pumpkin so far. I used about half to make ‘pumpkin gnocchi’, which my mum used to make when I was a kid and she kindly typed out the recipe for me and emailed it when I was living in London in the early noughts. It’s basically mashed pumpkin, eggs, melted butter, garlic, parmesan cheese, and semolina all mixed together and baked, then cut up into squares, served with a creamy herby sauce. After you cut the squares, you serve them in bowls with the sauce and then put back into the oven for a while to crisp up the edges a bit.
Pumpkin gnocchi
This didn’t turn out the best - I think because I didn’t have enough eggs for the amount of pumpkin we had so I substituted some of them with ‘flax eggs’ and it also needed a bit longer in the oven. I also substituted semolina with lupin flakes but I don’t think that was a problem. Anyways, it still tasted pretty good.
With the other half we made pumpkin soup - so original! It’s probably not worth it describing how I make pumpkin soup because I’m assuming everyone makes it (more or less) the same.
Good old pumpkin soup
We’re headed into winter about now and just days after I harvested the second and third pumpkins the first frost came and the vines seemed to die pretty quickly after that. There are a couple still out there that were just getting started so I’ll bring those in this weekend to add to the collection. Let’s hope we get another bumper pumpkin harvest next year.