Make Pumpkin Bowls for Soups

Serving autumn soups in pumpkin bowls will add a nice element to an autumn feast, or a regular dinner or lunch. Great for Thanksgiving or any day.

How to Make Pumpkin Bowls:

1 small-sized pumpkin per person

food scoop

sharp knife

1. Wash the pumpkins and allow the outsides to dry thoroughly.
2. Cut the top off each pumpkin, just like you were going to carve it. Take the pumpkin strands and seeds off.
3. Reserve the top to use as a cover for the bowl.
4. Reserve the seeds for roasted pumpkin seeds.
5. Scoop some of the pumpkin out to use in soups, but leave enough so the bowl will be sturdy while the soup is in it. Leave the pumpkin outside intact with no areas that are too thin.

Tips

• Grow your own pumpkins to save money.
• Use your spoon to scoop pumpkin from the insides as you eat the soup. This is still edible.
• Roast those pumpkin seeds!

Serving Suggestions

• Soups are healthy, and adding a side salad will give more of a nutritional punch.

What types of soups can be put into these Pumpkin Bowls? Any type of vegetable based soup will do. Look around this blog and see what interests you.

Shannon

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Hanging Herbs to Dry and Dried Herb Gift Jars

When my daughters were young, I’d bring them Trick-or-Treating each year. There was this one house we would go to, where the woman of the house always had multiple herbs hanging in bunches from her porch ceiling. She would invite us through into her kitchen, and the aroma of the porch was marvelous. I’ll always remember this porch and the aromas associated with it.

It’s easy to hang herbs to dry. I hung wire from my living room ceiling with hooks for this purpose. I have only dried parsley there so far, but it will work well for other herbs as well.

Here are the steps:

1. Cut the parsley with scissors from the garden.
2. Rinse and gently pat dry.
3. Wrap yarn or another type of string around the stems of the parsley bunches.
4. Hang from the ceiling.
5. Allow to dry until the parsley crumbles easily.
6. Crumble into clean jars and cover.
7. Store in a dark cupboard, or in the refrigerator.

These jars of herbs make great gifts for the holidays. Here are some ideas for decorating the jars:

• Create a tag and tie it on the jar with raffia.
• Create sticker tags to add the front of each jar.
• Cut a circle from fabric a little bigger than the jar cover and tie the fabric around the cover with yarn or raffia.

You can give one jar to each person, or many jars of different types of herbs to each person.

Other Tips:

• Keep drying herbs out of direct sunlight.
• Keep drying herbs away from heat sources such as a stove.
• Collect jars with covers from recycling centers, yard sales, friends, and family to save money.
• Use other food jars than those for canning.
• Small jars work best for this project.

Shannon