Halloween - some have been tinkering with costumes for weeks, for others the festivities are a horror. A few ideas to create the right Halloween atmosphere.
It will soon be that time again: Halloween is on the night of October 31st to November 1st. The custom of decorating the house and garden with pumpkins, giving children sweets at the door and "celebrating" the spooky night with suitable films has spilled over to Europe from the USA.
Where does Halloween come from?
The English name is a shortened form of "All Hallows Eve" - meaning the evening before All Saints' Day. However, the origins of the festival go back much further next , as the Catholic Church merely adopted the existing "Samhain Festival" of the Celts. On the night of Samhain, it was believed that the gates between the world of the living and the world of the dead were open. They also celebrated the transition from the fertile summer to the dormant winter months. The widespread festival was held hundreds of years before the birth of Christ - on the British Isles, but also on the European mainland. So Halloween is merely "coming home" when we now "celebrate" it again in Europe.
Pumpkin must be
There's no Halloween without pumpkins - the glowing autumn vegetables can be transformed into lanterns with scary faces. This was already done in Ireland and is now simply part of the festivities in the USA. Of course, the rest of the decoration is then coordinated with the orange and rusty red of the pumpkins and complemented with black, so that the cosy shivers don't come up short.
Pumpkins can be hollowed out and then carved with faces. And many delicious autumnal dishes can be prepared from the inside.
How to make a pumpkin decoration
To have as free a hand as possible when carving the pumpkin, it should be nice and big - and ripe enough. Just like with melons, you can tell how ripe it is by gently tapping it. If it sounds hollow, the pumpkin is ripe and ready for carving. Before carving, you should draw the contours you want to cut out on the pumpkin with a felt-tip pen. The stem can then be cut off and the inside removed. The shapes of the pumpkin face can now be cut out with a narrow knife blade and then carefully pressed out from the inside to the outside. The lighting can either be "built in" using a string of LED lights or a candle. However, candles or tea lights are best placed in a preserving jar for safety reasons and to prevent the wind from blowing them out. You can also find wonderful Halloween costumes that you can make yourself in our blog.
Conjuring up treats from pumpkin flesh
The beauty of pumpkin is that it has a subtle flavour - but at the same time it is very restrained. That's why you can prepare it in many different ways. Both savoury and spicy dishes as well as sweet treats can be conjured up from pumpkin. The colourful vegetable goes wonderfully well with goat cheese, but also with honey and can be rounded off with unusual ingredients such as ginger or allspice.
The following recipes are particularly delicious:
- Pumpkin chutney sweet and sour
- Pumpkin jam
- Pumpkin pie in puff pastry with goat cheese
- Ravioli with pumpkin filling
- Pumpkin soup
These are just a few examples of the variety of possibilities offered by this versatile vegetable. You can find more great vegetarian dishes, such as the spooky cucumber snake, on our blog. And since you can also buy pumpkins already sliced, those who don't want to decorate for Halloween still don't have to miss out on pumpkin. Smaller varieties, especially the popular Hokkaido, can also be used quite well in a single household.
The idea of using everything on the pumpkin is not new, by the way - appropriately shaped pumpkins were and are used as drinking vessels all over the world. These include varieties whose insides are not necessarily tasty, but which are cultivated because of their durable skin - the so-called calabashes. The large vegetable is thus very sustainable and has accompanied people for quite a long time - not only at Halloween.
