Carved

Dad decided to try carving into the surface of the pumpkin like the ones we saw at the pumpkinfest (Pumpkin Envy, Oct. 3). His result is a leonine rendering of Old Man Winter (the wind is blowing from the "mouth," which doubled as the belly button or nose in some costume photos.)

Halloween dinner

Bread crumbs, pumpkin, onions... a few other things (see Cooks.com Pumpkin Soup recipe). Soup cooked in the pumpkin. Delicious. Lots of variations to this... I've also tried a version that uses chicken stock in addition to light cream. My pumpkin was bigger than the recipe called for so I threw in some other things... cottage cheese in addition to swiss, for example. Dad said we should build a bonfire and cook our giant pumpkin.

Halloween short film

Love this short film (as seen on PBS's "Director's Cut") but I guess it's not really the kind of thing to watch as we get ready to carve our giant beauty...

Thank you

Thanks to everyone who followed the giant pumpkin progress and enjoyed the costumes! We won't be dressing it up anymore -- the idea was to continue until the big weigh-in at the pumpkinfest. We didn't quite get there, but it sure was fun to try. Maybe next year. Dad wants to carve the pumpkin, so please check the blog again -- we'll be posting more photos soon.

Pumpkin Envy

So, our giant pumpkin wasn't giant enough to compete with the top dogs this year. That's okay. We still enjoyed the Nekoosa Giant Pumpkin Fest where a 1,468 pound pumpkin was the second biggest (the first had already gone home). Ours made it somewhere in the 400 pound range. Dad is pictured below with some 600- and 700-pounders. This year the festival was moved away from the river because of the flooding, so they cancelled the pumpkin boat regatta (it seems like a good reason to HAVE pumpkin boats...) But they proceeded with the pumpkin drop, a much-anticipated event where a giant pumpkin is hoisted onto a crane and dropped onto a field. People like watching stuff explode. Today, they smashed a 1,288-pounder ... felt the ground thud when it hit. The best part, though, was when scads of children rushed the smashed pumpkin, hoping to find prizes (yesterday's pumpkin apparently contained ping-pong balls). Finding none, they carried away pumpkin chunks, ant-like.

Matryoshka Pumpkins, Sept. 28

Chicken, Sept. 26