A Tasty Peanut Free Snack: Sweet & Spicy Pumpkin Seeds

B and I carved a pumpkin* tonight - so much fun! And a great by-product is pumpkin seeds - all toasted and spiced. So dang good! BTW, don't tell B I said dang or I'll get a time out :)

I found a great recipe for sweet and spicy pumpkin seeds on Martha Stewart's site. Basically you take the seeds from your pumpkin (we had a kind of medium, bordering on large one that yielded about 2 cups of seeds but the ratio of sugar and spice to seeds works just fine), dry roast them in the oven and then saute them with sugar and a blend of spices.

Then you eat, like, a cup of them. Wait, did I say that? Ok, the last part I just added in. I'm not sure what's going to happen to me once I digest the cup I ate immediately after they were done, but that might be fodder for another post. D'oh!

So back to the recipe. I go to the cabinets to start getting ingredients. But then I look at the recipe and it had cayenne in. B's not a huge fan of spicy, so instead of the salt, cumin, cinnamon, and ginger, I substitute an equal amount of Lawry's season salt, but follow the rest of the directions to the letter (including the amounts of sugar - jeez it's alot). And then the magic happened.

Holy Schnikees. These were so GOOD!

Have I mentioned how good they were.

The longest part is the dry roasting of the seeds - takes an hour. But beyond that it takes about 5 minutes.

So one hour and 5 minutes later and you'll be set.

And for pete's sake, show some restraint. Unlike me. :)

* No, that photo isn't our pumpkin. Frankly I just don't have that much time on my hands. This image is from the Martha Stewart website. Isn't it gorgeous??