Pumpkin Seeds, the All-Saints Day Treat

Around here, pumpkin seeds are an All-Saints Day treat.*  You know, All-Saints Day, the day after Halloween?  If you're in New Orleans, you traditionally go to the cemetery and clean up your family plot.  Okay, okay, I don't really know anyone who does that anymore.  But I used to be dragged out there as a child.  My grandma used to go buy gladiolus (because she thought they lasted the longest) to arrange in plastic-in-cement vases on the graves of our dearly departed.

To me, these will always be "cemetery flowers"

But I digress ...

Pumpkin seeds.  Pumpkin seeds are a new tradition.  You see, my mom was 46 when I was born, and she was TIRED (note to Mom: I get it now).  The very last thing she wanted to do was (a) carve a pumpkin or (b) figure out how to roast pumpkin seeds.  Yeah, mom wasn't really into cooking.  She made a lot of good stuff, when she felt like it.  Oh, but when she didn't feel like cooking?  Broiled chicken.  We had broiled chicken so often that when my friend Darlene came over one summer day during my high school years and was invited to stay, she actually said, "Sure!  What are we having, broiled chicken?  That's what we eat every time I visit!"  My mom was all pissy over that later, but Darlene did have a point.

I had this so often as a kid, I rarely make it now, though my kids love it.  Oops.

Anyway.  Pumpkin seeds.  When I had kids, I wanted to do all the fun things that my parents were too tired to do with me.  One of the first orders of business was to carve a pumpkin.  My hubby David was shocked that I had never carved a pumpkin.  So he cleaned one out (because I wasn't going to do that, blech, pumpkin guts!) and carved it up into a cheery, smiling pumpkin.  Our baby Drew was about 18 months at the time, and he called it a "popky."  How adorable is that?  He just loved it once it was lit and glowing at him.  Then I had to deal with the popky guts.  Hmmm.

Obligatory cute trick-or-treater pic, circa 2003-ish.

My friend Charlotte (how I miss you, my friend!) had just moved in across the street from us, and was apparently a pro at roasting pumpkin seeds.  She taught me how to clean them up and do a basic salted-pumpkin-seeds recipe. Okay, this is pretty easy, I thought.  It then became my mission to try different pumpkin seed recipes every year -- sweet or savory, didn't matter to me, I tried them all! This year, I went back to basics and made a simple batch of pumpkin seeds with a little kick:

These are were delicious!

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Ingredients:

Seeds from one good-sized pumpkin (cleaned of guts and well-drained)
2 tbsp. olive oil (should always be in your pantry, hasn't Rachel Ray taught you anything?!)
2 tbsp. butter (the real stuff, don't use that nasty fake margarine)**
1/2 tsp. freshly-grated sea salt (buy a big container at Sam's, comes with a built-in grater)
1/3 tsp. garlic powder (NOT garlic salt!)
1/4 tsp. Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning (you should always have this on hand, too)

Preheat oven to 400°.  In a small pot, melt the olive oil and butter together, and then sprinkle in the remaining ingredients (except the seeds) until they are mostly dissolved.  Turn off the heat and pour in the cleaned and drained pumpkin seeds.  Stir until they are well-coated, and then pour onto a pan that you have covered with aluminum foil (no, it isn't necessary to cover the pan, but it does save on clean-up).  Spread them out evenly and pop into the oven, on the middle shelf.  Stir them around every five minutes to ensure even toasting. Stop when they are golden (15-20 minutes).  Carefully lift up the aluminum foil and dump the contents into a wire strainer (to drain the excess olive oil/butter mixture), and once drained, spread the seeds onto a couple of layers of paper towels and sprinkle with some more freshly-grated sea salt.  Serves a family of five.  Or, you know, one, if they others aren't fast enough.

*Everywhere else, I'm sure people enjoy these all during October, too, but here in hotter-than-Hades Texas, we can't carve our pumpkins early, because overnight they start to grow nasty black mold (and no amount of Vaseline stops that, no matter what people tell me) and by Halloween, they are shriveling into truly horrifying blobs.

**I use Plugra, and only Plugra.  It's a European-style butter that costs a little more, but tastes like candy.