We love spooky season more than most people. Decorating starts early for our family! This is our first year in our wonderful new house and we were surprised to be the only house decorated for Halloween in the entire neighborhood…

In addition to decorating we cherish our annual family pumpkin patch adventure! This year was a little different due to Covid19 and a little more rushed but we found our pumpkins and were able to get out of the house for a bit! My daughter is finally old enough to help design and carve her own pumpkin! She loved the entire process, even the yucky guts!

This year my husband suggested we try to find a use for every part of the pumpkins. Challenge Accepted!

The main part of the pumpkin is of course used as the Halloween jack-O-lantern. The carved out chunks that make the faces were happily gobbled up by our dogs as an afternoon treat. The inside pumpkin leftovers were up to me!

The real challenge for me was the slimy guts… I had never heard of a use for them and always just threw it all away. After some research though I discovered that you can easily turn that gooey mess into pumpkin puree! I rinsed it all and painstakingly removed all of (most of…) the seeds. Then I tossed it all into a food processor and BAM! Pumpkin puree!

Now what to do with all of it…

The first experiment I tried was to create Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese Filling! Click the link for the full recipe! It turned out perfectly! It is incredibly delicious and perfect for pumpkin season! I added a little spooky touch of course.

After pureeing the pumpkin guts all that was left was the seeds. We all know what to do with these but I wanted to try something different this year. Check out my Air Fryer Pumpkin Seeds post for the full recipe!

After it was all said and done, no part of our pumpkins went to waste and we got some delicious treats out of it! It has me curious about other ways we can reduce our waste through creativity!

I still have an insane amount of pumpkin puree to use so stay tuned for more pumpkin recipes!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!