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If you’ve never made your own pumpkin from scratch anything before and always relied on canned purees to fill your pies and nourish your muffins, then perhaps you too didn’t realize that jack o lantern pumpkins were not to be cooked with. Motivated to make something good out of our surplus of carving pumpkins, I would make pumpkin soup. The baseline recipe I would be using from one of my favorite Alice Waters cookbooks called for sugar pumpkins and I knew those orange orbs perched on our stoop would not suffice. I learned that sugar pumpkins are darker orange, have vertical stems and are less stringy than carving pumpkins. I learned that Whole Foods didn’t have any in stock and I learned that Bristol Farms only had small pumpkins at 1 lb each. Good grief.

The hardest part of this recipe was slicing the pumpkins horizontally. The skin was very tough and I was certain that in the Halloween spirit, I would lose a finger. I stabilized each pumpkin in the metal cup that sits within my cutting board and then pierced the flesh with a ghoulish stab and finished the job by slitting the beast in half until the innards wept out – too much Freddy? After that task, it was a matter of scooping, roasting, scooping, cooking. All done with about 30 minutes of my actual attention.

While the sugar pumpkin roasted, I figured on a way to warm my kids to the idea of eating pumpkin soup while giving them a little whole grain nibble.

Using the hollowed out bottom half of the roasted pumpkin shell, I created a jack o lantern soup-scape. The croutons were a breeze to shape and toast.

Starting with a piece of whole grain bread, I cut a circle and from there the jack shapes emerged. Consider using Halloween cookie cutters for other interesting soupscapes. I brushed the bread with olive oil on both sides and toasted them in my toaster oven for 3 minutes until brown.

No tricks and all treats, which deserved my kind of Halloween cocktail.

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