October 19th, 2009 | 
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I love the crunch of lightly salted pumpkin seeds, still warm from the oven. This is just a teaser for the pie to come and is incredibly easy and quick.
We found a nice little sugar pie pumpkin at the market that we sliced in half and baked at about 350°. I dusted these with some kosher salt; I also like adding a shake of cayenne or chili powder. I suspect there’s some phenomenal spice mixture to be created (maybe a dab of brown sugar, ginger, and cinnamon with a pinch of salt?) that would give you pumpkin pie-flavored seeds. We still have a couple of weeks until Halloween; I’ll have to experiment.
I started baking these together on the same pan; this saved washing an extra pan but was a little fiddly to get the seeds off when they were toasted and lightly brown, about 10-15 minutes later. The pumpkin still needed another half-hour until it was fork-tender.
The seeds store well in Tupperware-type containers or plastic bags once they’ve cooled. I’ll cube and freeze the pumpkin until I’m ready to make the pie. Stay tuned!
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Those seeds look so yummy! I’d love it if you came to my blog and left a link to your favorite fall vegetable recipe for my Favorite Fall Vegetable Recipe Roundup- http://www.meatlessmama.com/2009/10/favorite-fall-vegetable-recipe-roundup_20.html
Thanks for the idea to freeze the cooked pumpkin – may need to try that with the abundance of winter squash from my CSA. I bet those seeds would be great in granola. Haven’t had much success making my own granola. Have you tried it?
I’d tried making granola at the end of the summer – it sounded like a good thing, with apple butter and walnuts and oats, but it came out more like soft oatmeal cookies. Not that I have anything against cookies, but it wasn’t what I was going for. Alton Brown had one that sounded promising with almonds, cashews and coconut at http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/granola-recipe/index.html.