Lessons in Cooking: Pumpkin Seeds

I forgot this was cooking until it was much later in the process (as always now). I'm baking cornbread for Thanksgiving and I found a pumpkin cornbread recipe. I actually wasn't inspired to try it until I remembered that we still had 2 pumpkins that we should use and I figured I'd give it a shot and make the pumpkin purée myself rather than storebought.

Then once I had amassed the seeds from preparing the pumpkin, I figured why not try to do something with the seeds?

I prefer sweet seeds rather than savory, so I found a roasted cinnamon recipe. I knew I had to dry out the seeds first and I guess I did it wrong because after washing and rinsing them, I left them inbetween two paper towels overnight and the next day I had to pick them off and they all mostly had some paper towel residue left on them, oops. I decided to just go ahead with it anyway since there weren't that many and I still wanted to try roasting them.

The recipe was small and simple, using sugar, salt, cinnamon, vanilla and coconut oil. I think there might have been too much oil for the amount of seeds that I had, there was still a lot in the pan when I pulled them out, and they still seemed a little damp, but they had already been in the oven 10 minutes past the maximum cook time and I didn't want to burn them, so they just were what they were at that point.

Roasting in the oven

Drying on the counter

In the end they weren't bad at all, and they smelled like Disneyland churros. I think I needed to dry the seeds out more so they had a little more pop. Next time!