Pumpkin Fail 1

Now I know why my parents never let me have a pumpkin to carve at Halloween. It always seemed like a wasteful thing to do anyway, but still a lot of people seem to have fun with it. Who knew those suckers were so tough?

First, there's the shell. It's not a rind or skin. It's a shell. A hard one. It took all of my strength to cut through the outer covering with a chef knife. I went straight in and then tried to cut around the middle. I had to saw with the knife and finally just gave the whole pumpkin a strong tap on the counter. Part of it was nicely cut, and part of one half was pretty ragged, but I got the thing opened.

Then, there's the innards. All the recipes say "clean out the seeds and strings." How hard could that be? I reached right in and started pulling. Yuck! The strings are tough, impossible to break, hard to cut. And everything is slippery.

Finally, there's that instruction: "remove the skin." Huh! I tried a potato peeler, as instructed, and darned near ruined it before I quit. I then tried a knife, finally hitting upon the idea of cutting each section in smaller pieces and then paring the skin off. At the same time, I more or less peeled out the remains of the strings from the inner surface.

I got one-fourth of the pumpkin cut into three large sections for baking (skin on). The next fourth was cut into smaller sections and then cleaned up for boiling (skin off). The next two-fourths are still laying on the kitchen counter. I think that half of the pumpkin will go in the trash unless I grow a new wrist. My wrists went numb while I was carving, and they still ache with remembered pain. I have my doubts about cooking this monster.