Carving a pumpkin - some advice

You'll need a sharp knife. Pumpkin skin is tough, so the sharper the better. It might even be worth buying a knife sharpener. Serrated knives can also be very helpful here. If the blade is narrow that helps turn tight corners, useful for fiddly bits like eyes and the corner of mouths.

If you want to draw your design on the outside, Sharpies work, or you can score the pumpkin skin or take out a narrow channel using the point of your knife. Remember that as well as holes all the way through the skin and flesh you can just take off the skin to give a warm subtle glowing line, though you need to scrape away more of the flesh inside and keep testing until it gives the effect you want.

To lid or not to lid? You can start by making the traditional hole in the top of the pumpkin, in which case you can choose to create a lid you'll put back on or leave off. The advantage of a lid is that the candle doesn't get rained on. The disadvantage is that if you have a short pumpkin and a tall candle you may singe the inside of the lid, and singed pumpkin flesh will put you right off eating your delicious pumpkin-based feast. If the pumpkin is going to stay outside this doesn't matter so much. Alternatively you can make a hole through from the back of the pumpkin and not bother about cutting lids, which may help the airflow for your candle.

If you are going to cut a lid, remember the pumpkin will shrink a little as it dries out. Cut a wider, flatter cut and your lid is less likely to fall right in after a day or so.

Scoop out the seeds. Rumour has it you can roast these, salt and eat them, but in practice this takes ages and doesn't give a great result. Perhaps putting them out for the birds is a better bet. This bit is nice and easy, easier still if you have a spoon with a relatively thin edge. The flesh is harder to get out, and you may have to resort to scoring the flesh in a cross-hatch pattern with your sharp knife, then scooping out the shards. Carving the flesh out with the knife is almost certainly going to be disastrous because of the curve and the possibility of injuring yourself. The more you carve out, the more of the recipes below you can try, which is at least an incentive!

But what design? If this really is your first try, a traditional mouth and eyes are perfectly respectable. If that's not ambitious enough how about an animal face? Cats for some reason work well as pumpkin lanterns. Or for the truly extraordinary, try this Reddit Pumpkins thread which has some very fancy carving. It also contains some painted and dressed pumpkins, not something that has really spread to the UK, and which suggests they're made to be seen in daylight rather than the dark UK evenings after the clocks have gone back, and surely celebrating the dark side is the whole point?

Savoury Recipes

Pumpkins are very versatile, but that's partly because they don't tend to have a strong flavour themselves. Fortunately this means they work well with strong flavours and spice, in fact in America mixed spice is known as pumpkin spice. So although pumpkins originate from north America, they have travelled widely and been adopted by various spice-loving cuisines. We start with a simple recipe, though it really requires a pumpkin of its own rather than the tiny shards of flesh you've removed from your lantern.

Roast Pumpkin Slices

• Preheat oven to 200 C
• Cut pumpkin slices (skin and flesh) about 1cm thick at their thickest
• Slather with olive oil
• Sprinkle (or rub) with chopped garlic and garam masala, or cinnamon and a bit of salt
• Roast until the edges turn dark brown and the thickest areas are soft (25-35 mins)
• Munch

We also recommend... a simple pumpkin soup: saute onions in butter or oil, add pumpkin flesh in small bits, add a good stock, a sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg, salt to taste, cream if you want to add some in, and if you tend to the theatrical serve in a pumpkin. You'll want to roast the pumpkin for a bit. If it's very big you can microwave the shell for a bit before roasting, but not too long or it'll collapse! This does suit a sit-down dinner party more than a rambling get together in the dark.

And of course pumpkin is ideal for curry, both Caribbean style curries, and Indian subcontinental ones. Classic combinations include kodu ghost (pumpkin and lamb) - perfectly names for a Hallowe'en feast - and kodu sag (pumpkin, spinach and sometimes chickpeas). The lamb fat does lend depth and richness to the curry, so if you're going for a veggie/vegan alternative a bit of extra coconut oil works wonders. The queen of using UK-available veg in Indian (mainly Gujerati) curries is of course Meera Sodha, and her recipe for Pumpkin curry with black eyed beans and coconut (Olan) is extremely well regarded. We think it's pretty much the recipe you could order at Thali before it closed [sob]. This comes from the excellent Fresh India - vegetable recipes which all work very well.

Sweet Recipes

Since time immemorial (or at least 1796) Pumpkin Pie has been the quintessential recipe. It calls for pumpkin spice, which Wikipedia tells us helpfully is cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves and allspice, with a vast emphasis on the cinnamon. Probably there are as many pumpkin spice blends as there are self-respecting cooks in North America! The first mention comes in the first American Cookbook, by orphan Amelia Simmons which is long out of copyright and therefore available in its entirety on Google Books, if you like culinary history! Our recipe is a little more recent.

Miranda's Pumpkin Pie

As you process your Hallowe'en pumpkin, add the flesh to a saucepan with a knob of butter and some cinnamon and a very generous dollop of golden syrup. Simmer to mush with the lid off (getting rid of the liquid is key. You can also roast it in chunks with a bit of oil and then whizz it in the food processor).

The next day, or whenever, having lightly baked your pastry case, add your pumpkin puree plus 2 eggs, about 100ml milk, 2 tbsp flour or 1 cornflour, nutmeg, a good tsp salt (essential) and some nutmeg plus sugar and cinnamon to taste. All should be mixed well. Bake till set but still slightly jiggly in the middle.

Cakes and biscuits

A good flavoured pumpkin (which usually means one grown by you or a local farmer, not the massed produced sort favoured by supermarkets) can be slightly gingerbread-flavoured anyway, so ginger is a natural bedfellow. We like the look of this dark squidgy loaf cake, made with treacle and two sorts of ginger. It uses up a decent 250g pumpkin.

Pumpkin being squidgy, it can make very good vegan biscuits. Make a sweetened pumpkin puree (similar to the first stage of the pumpkin pie recipe above, but with dairy-free margerine). Mix in a little aquafaba or flax-seed egg substitute, add self-raising flour to make a good stiff paste, and if you get it stiff enough you might even be able to roll out and cut with a cookie cutter. Bake for 10-15 mins depending on the size and thickness of your biscuits. One of the grand things about vegan baking is that the ingredients are not dangerous raw, so you can eat them half-baked if you prefer them that way! Frost / decorate as desired.

Who's at the Door?

With the Jack O'Lantern on the doorstep and the enticing cooking smells from indoors, you're bound to attract visitors. Want to know which ones to invite in? Use our handy Identification Guide to distinguish who's safe to invite across the threshhold...