This weekend we were supposed to head out to Long Island for our annual pumpkin picking outing for my Mom’s birthday. It’s super fun and we tend to eat everything in sight at the farm (roasted corn, apples, lemonade, hot dogs, cotton candy, baked goods) and then we go home and eat even more for the actual birthday dinner. When the feasting is finished, we pack our pudgy selves into the car and roll on back to Brooklyn armed with pumpkins to carve. Unfortunately, this year the event was canceled due to the rainy weather.
To make up for the lack of pumpkins to carve, Alex suggested we pick one up at the farmer’s market this weekend and get our carve on that way. Great idea! As the ideas started to kick around in our heads, we started discussing ways we could eat the pumpkins or what we could fill them with. After all, it’s always about eating with us. I suggested soup. He suggested meat and other good stuff… and then he had it: Meat-O-Lanterns!
So we picked up some buttercup squash at the farmer’s market Saturday morning, as it was the closest thing resembling a pumpkin and weighed in at roughly one serving. We scraped out the insides and set them aside. Next, we carved them up and roasted the lanterns alone for 20 or so minutes while we whipped up the mix for the inside. Once they were roasted, we filled them with a cooked mix of celery, carrots, onions, buttercup squash, mushrooms, whole wheat egg noodles, ground pork, salt, pepper, garlic, sage and chicken broth. Once filled, they roasted for 15 more minutes and were so delicious! Not bad for something that looked like brains. So the next time someone says “What should we make for Halloween that’s both nutritious and slightly ghoulish?”, don’t send them to some crackpot Martha recipe. Tell them it’s all about the Meat-o-lanterns!
You can find the rest of the Meat-O-Lantern photos here.
p.s. yes, we recognize we’re huge nerds.
