Halloween Hangover
By raincoaster
pic credit PhotoJunkie
So your family, your pancreas, your teeth, your dignity, and your liver have made it through another Halloween. Now to deal with the fallout.
My mother would give us each five pieces of candy on Halloween itself and keep the rest to sort through overnight, checking for pins in apples, etc. We never did get a bad piece, but once I turned eight I sort of realized that the volume of candy was substantially reduced the next day. After that I insisted on staying up and auditing her candy check. You can’t pull a fast one on raincoaster, nosireee. Well, not EIGHT years in a row!
But now it’s Halloween Hangover day and time to clean up. Gather candy wrappers from pockets and flowerpots, wash the soap off the windows and eggs off the car (presuming you ran out of candy and didn’t give the universal Jack O’Lantern Gone Dark signal), and dispose of the Jack O’Lantern itself.
Hummingbird604 has some tips:
People tend to forget that they have to dispose of the pumpkin once the Halloween celebrations are over. So, when you think about disposing of your pumpkin, remember that you can
– Compost it – Cut it in very small pieces and throw it in the composting bin.
– Dispose it in the organic section of your trash bin – Donāt forget to separate organics from inorganics!
Given how many households and businesses carve pumpkins, I would appreciate if you thought about the negative environmental consequences of inadequate disposal.
Ah, but he’s left off the best way of all: baking! Contrary to popular opinion, there’s no actual law preventing you from making and serving pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie and pumpkin cupcakes or even pumpkin stew on non-holiday days, and given the price of a good, thick pumpkin I’d be looking at recycling it in this way before using it to nourish my night-blooming gardenia garden. Toss the carbon-coated lid and anything that doesn’t look fresh and roast/bake/puree away! Just be sure to do it within 24 hours.
November 2nd, 2008 at 1:27 am
Thanks for the shout-out! BTW – I hadn’t thought of baking – I should have, though! š
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Yes, especially if you’ve tasted that pumpkin stew!
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
In the Annalucia/Tedesco household, we buy *two* varieties of pumpkin – the big one for the carving, and the small ones for the cooking. The jack-o-lantern variety are too tough to cook well (or so the Tedesco affirms) and by the time one has scraped out the scorch marks and the melted wax there is little left to work with anyway.
So Jack returns to the earth from which he came, and the smooth, small ones with the deep creases are made into the Tedesco’s specialty pies.
November 3rd, 2008 at 7:18 pm
They are indeed tough, which is why pureeing or stewing are basically the only way to cook them. Next year I’ll keep an eye out for the smaller ones, because I do love pumpkin in anything.