Baked Pumpkin

Remember the last time I dined @Collage, I was pretty hooked with its baked pumpkin. Seeing how simple yet tasty, I tried to make my own version of baked pumpkin. I used a quite small orange skin pumpkin (the one that you normally carve for Halloween Jack o’lantern). People said, the small pumpkin has sweeter taste than the big ones. Choose the one with a hard skin (try to press the skin around it – if you find some soft spot or cut on the skin, then you’d better choose another one).

The baked pumpkin - fresh from the oven

I peeled its skin (but I guess you could bake it with the skin intact – the one I had @Collage had the skin but just make sure you clean the skin thoroughly). I cleaned the seeds as well (including those ‘tangled-hair-alike’ stuff). Don’t throw the seeds away…just set it aside for temporary. Then I chopped the pumpkin into a bite size square chunk. Prepared and mix the following: salt + thyme + oregano + cumin + grinded pepper + dried chili + olive oil + water. If you dislike spice, then you could use water + olive oil + salt only. Then put the pumpkin inside this mixture and let it marinating for about 30mins. Preheat the oven.

Preparation for marinating

There are two ways to bake the pumpkin. If you want a crunchy baked pumpkin, then after 30mins, drain up all the water. Put the pumpkin on the pan and sprinkle the olive oil and salt evenly. Cover the pan with aluminum foil then bake for 30mins (medium heat). But if you want your baked pumpkin to be a little bit moist, after 30mins of marinating, drain up the pumpkin but leave about 1cm (in height) of the mixture. Put the pumpkin and the mixture into the pan, cover it with aluminum foil and bake for 30mins (medium heat). It could take longer if your pumpkin is big in size.

Cleaned and rinsed pumpkin seeds - ready for marinating

For the pumpkin seeds, I cleaned and rinsed several times. Then I mixed water + salt and put the seeds into this mixture for 30mins. After that, I drained up all the water and dry the seeds (tap softly using tissue paper). Put the seeds into the pan and sprinkled some salt evenly. Baked together with the pumpkin   ;-)

The crunchy roasted pumpkin seeds

Now, you could have this simple snack of pumpkin seed (which was eaten up by my girls in less than 10mins) and baked pumpkin. Yummy and healthy   J