Be Hallo-Green
With only a day left for final Halloween preparations here are a few ideas to get in the spirit of this increasingly popular celebration.
For the last month you’ve seen the costumes, the pumpkins and scary foods (yes – ghost cupcakes), but all around you there are items you can re-use to add some Halloween spirit to your home.
- Most charity shops have put out a costume section for Halloween, there are costumes that others have outgrown or simply aren’t wanted any more that you can snap up at a bargain price
- Cut out ghostly shapes from junk mail and cereal boxes, attached them to your windows and shine a light behind them to give scary silhouette glow to your windows. A torch or lamp will help cast a shadow, DO NOT use a candle.
- It may be a cliché but you could use white sheets as ghost costumes, draw faces in washable ink so you can wash it off!
And what about your pumpkin?
It’s not just a scary face, whilst the outside is working hard to scare the trick and treaters the inside of your pumpkin can also work hard to make a variety of delicious meals for you. Since you bought the whole pumpkin you might as well use it all up!
Pumpkins are grown in the UK, and are in season from late September until early December. The pumpkin capital of the Europe is Spalding in Lincolnshire, where the 500 acre farm produces almost three-quarters of the pumpkins for the UK’s largest supermarkets.
- Make pumpkin soup to have for lunch over the next few days, or freeze it for another week
- Prepare a pumpkin based lasagne, if you don’t want to eat it today or this week you can cook it and freeze it for another day
- Make a pumpkin curry using this recipe sent to us by a Hounslow resident
- You can also roast the pumpkin seeds for a healthy snack that you can eat by themselves or add to a salad. You don’t need to put pumpkin seeds in the oven to roast them, instead put them in a frying pan with no oil or butter over a low heat and stir them until they change colour. Add a seasoning like salt, pepper or chilli powder if you want to give them extra flavour.
- If you have a sweeter tooth then Pumpkin Tart might be the dish for you
If you have any pumpkin recipes to add to our collection, send us a photo and details of how to make it and we’ll put your recipe on our local recipes page too.