Halloween Pumpkin Carving

I come to eat your children

I have come to type this post with a puffy chest. Yah.. I am about to boast. Check out this pumpkin carving. Is that not cooler than the ones you see on the Martha Stewart show? At least on this blog post, there is no Martha Stewart interrupting her guest mid-sentence.

This is the first pumpkin that we have ever attempted. I use the word WE loosely as I clearly did not encourage or participate in this. If you read my posts here from November 2010. I declared cutting pumpkins as one of my hates in cooking. Mick came back with this pumpkin from Woolworths. He said it costs $11. I gave him the side glance like W.T.H. $11! Edited: Mick corrected me, it was about $20!! I thought he would not carve it and it would be sitting there rotting and mocking my pumpkin cutting skills. But look how well it turned out.

Carving WIP D says Oh Hai

This is the pumpkin carving work in progress. Tools used in this exercise was a hacksaw blade plus a bread slicing knife that had a jagged edge. Pickles is looking mighty serious here and D was posing for the picture. They got a bit bored after helping dig out the seeds and ran inside. But D told me he wanted to help with the pumpkin and went back out to carve the eyes and nose with the hacksaw blade with Mick guiding him. I am not sure how nobody has lost any fingers.

So it looks like I better prepare candy for tomorrow as we might get a few door knockers with this outside the house. How cool is that!

Hate these bits of cooking!

I love cooking.. well I don't mind it. I love eating more so someone's gotta cook.
That someone has been me recently since Mick's new working hours suck eggs. Things I hate doing when cooking ...

1) Cutting pumpkins, is there anything worse than fighting with a big chunk of pumpkin? I have decent knives too, so I am not sure what I did before getting said decent knives. I think I was hacking them apart with a big cleaver!

2) Deep frying, I love fried food. Hello fried chicken soaked in buttermilk mmmmm... but I hate doing it. It's always so gross, so tedious and so annoying. Then what the heck do you do with that pot of oil after???

3) Washing up afterwards, I am not sure what I did before I had a dishwasher. Pray tell!? What did I do?!? I remember our little one bedroom flat, tiniest kitchen sink and I had the biggest pots!

4) Stirring risotto, my arms.. they hurt. I love risotto, hate stirring it.

What are some of the stuff you hate when cooking?