Put Those Pumpkins to Use

If you're like me, you're wondering what you can you can do with that pumpkin you're gonna carve into a jackolantern.
Well, what you're gonna do with it besides carve it into a jackolantern anyways.
You're bored of simply roasting the seeds and there's not enough spare meat in a jackolantern pumpkin to make a pie, so what can you do?
You can bake cookies.

The first thing you want to do is soak the pumpkin seeds; these will become your flour. Soak them overnight. There will be about one cup of seeds in your pumpkin.

Secondly you'll want to scrape as much meat (not guts) out of the pumpkin as you dare. Cutting some off of the lid is a great shortcut here. Cover it and microwave it for five minutes. Then toss it in a blender (with water) or food processor until you have pumpkin puree. Hopefully you'll have a half cup of this. If not then you may need to scrape more, get a second pumpkin, or just buy some canned pumpkin puree. This will replace butter.

Now it's the next day. Roast or dehydrate your seeds now, whichever you prefer. After that's done you need to grind up your pumpkin seeds into "flour". Use a food processor or a high speed blender or a coffee grinder or and old-fashioned mill or whatever you want; what's important is that you grind the seeds until it's a uniform powder with no large pieces. The first time I made these I didn't grind the seeds all the way. The cookies tasted fine but they felt a little weird to chew.

Now the pre-preparation is done, and you can begin.

For a dozen pumpkin cookies, you need:

• ground pumpkin seeds - 1 cup
• pumpkin puree - 1/2 cup
• baking powder - 1/4 tsp
• sugar - 1/2 cup
• egg - 1
• vanilla extract - 1/2 tsp

If you want to double this recipe, you need a second pumpkin. If you want to double this recipe, don't double the egg.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly grease a baking sheet.

Mix your dry ingredients in one bowl and set it aside.

Cream the puree and sugar together in another bowl. Now beat in the egg and vanilla.

Now mix the contents of both bowls together.

In twelve scoops of about one tbsp, put the dough onto the baking sheet. It's okay if the dough seems greasy or too fluid; that's just the oils from the pumpkin seeds. Flatten out the balls of dough now; they won't spread too much in the oven.

Bake for 18 - 22 minutes.

And that is how you make a dozen pumpkin cookies.

The macros of these will come out to about 5g of fat, 10.7g of carbs, and 3.5g of protein at 93 cal per cookie.