Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

Good for you, tasty, and novel. Making your own pumpkin seeds for eating is all those things! My pumpkins are decorating my porch a few more days so I can't show you the step by step photos until the end of the week. But here is how you do it. 1) Put your hands in that opened pumpkin and pull that wet, sticky wads of stringy seeds out! I drop it on a paper bag. It will stick to paper towels forget those. Pull it ALL OUT.

I let this sit a bit so the wet soaks into the bag.

2) Start pulling those seeds out of the mess one by one. Get the kids to help!

3) Soak the seeds in salted water (1 1/2 tsp salt to 2/3 cup water) soak over night

4) drain the seeds, pat dry with paper towels

5) place seeds on a low baking pan, I put foil on a cookie sheet. Bake in 300 degree F. oven for 20 minutes, or until just golden. DO NOT over cook. Yuck.

It's hard to figure out how long to cook pumpkin seeds. It depends on how large and how moist they are. After 15 minutes begin checking every 5 minutes. Mostly it seems to take about 30 minutes.

You can eat the shells or remove the shells it all depends on how big the seeds are.

OPT.

Once you remove the shells you can toast them under the broiler, watching all the time, until they pop!

1/2 cup pumpkin seeds has 350 calories and 18 grams of protein