This episode is sponsored by Sports Illustrated Kids, a great magazine for kids who love sports and all kinds of games.
Did you know pumpkins are orange due to the organic pigments called carotenoids, but they can also be found in yellow, green and white varieties.
Welcome to the Chop Chop Podcast.
I'm Sally Sampson.
And I'm Harry Rosenblum.
Our mission at Chop Chop is to enrich the lives of families by inspiring and teaching them to cook and eat real food together.
And this week, we're back with more on pumpkins.
This episode is going to focus on decorating pumpkins.
Listeners, do you like to carve pumpkins for Halloween?
Do you like them scary or funny?
I like to try to give them some sort of expression, like a wink or a laugh, or maybe sticking out their tongue.
Let's make cookies!
Harry, what's the history of carving pumpkins for Halloween?
Well, since we've been talking all about pumpkins lately, I was reading about that, and pumpkin carving originated from an ancient Celtic tradition during a festival that was called Samhain, and it was used to ward off spirits.
And initially for the tradition, they used turnips and other root vegetables and they carved them into faces and put small candles inside.
When Irish immigrants came to North America, They adopted the more readily available pumpkin, which turned out to be, I think, a better canvas, because they're bigger and they're hollow inside.
And that's what led us to the modern jack-o'-lantern.
That was certainly smart because it's also a larger canvas.
And when you carve them, you can get more light inside.
So that's cool.
And one of my favorite things as a kid carving pumpkins was always that you got to have a snack.
So you know I really.
I mean I like turnips now, but as a kid I can't imagine carving out the inside of a turnip and then eating that as a snack.
Pumpkin seeds are great.
Do you want to hear a joke?
What did the pumpkin say to the pie baker?
Use apples instead.
Hello again.
This is Matt the Engineer, and I have a game for us to play.
Can you guess this month's mystery sound?
Let's turn down the music and give it a listen.
If you're not sure, try describing what you heard.
Maybe you think it sounds like an electrical kitchen gadget or something from the garden.
I'll be back before the end of the show to let you know what it was.
See you next time.
He has some great tips for listeners about decorating and carving pumpkins at home.
The Jacqueline Spectacular at Roger Williams Park Zoo is approximately a quarter mile long trail that snakes through the zoo's wetlands trail.
It features 5,000 intricately carved jack-o'-lanterns.
We're in our 37th year now.
And the total tally of visitors is somewhere around 5 million people over those 37 years.
When I look at a pumpkin and decide where I want to start carving, I first set the pumpkin down and figure out which side do I want the face to be on.
First, I'll draw that shape of that pumpkin on a piece of paper and I'll sketch out a few faces on the paper.
Some of the jack-o'-lanterns that I've carved in my life are up to 2,000 pounds.
Some are only a pound.
But for those 2000 pound pumpkins that someone has spent an entire summer nurturing and loving and growing, we need to do them justice.
So I'll step back.
I'll draw a few faces that match the kind of shape and lean of a pumpkin.
And then what I'll do is I'll translate that onto the face of the pumpkin using a marker.
One kind of great marker to use is a red Crayola marker, because the red doesn't really show up and you can wipe it off easily.
What I use is a black Sharpie marker.
That'll create really defined lines that won't wash off when I'm carving into the pumpkin.
So then I draw the face on the pumpkin and then I step back and I look at it again.
Now, before I start carving out the face, we have to cut the pumpkin.
And get out all the goop and all the seeds and all the yummy stuff from the inside.
Most people cut the top out of a pumpkin.
We don't.
We think it's best to cut the bottom out of a pumpkin.
There are a couple different reasons.
When you cut the top out of a pumpkin, you know you take its hat off.
You're essentially losing a lot of the structural stability, a lot of the strength that that pumpkin has going up to its stem.
Secondly, a lot of times pumpkins are wobbly on the bottom.
And if you want to put a candle, like we used to a long time ago, even at the show the inside of a pumpkin isn't always flat and a wobbly pumpkin is You don't want to put a candle in.
So when we cut out the bottom, we then can set a candle on the flat surface of a step on your porch.
So I carve the bottom out of a pumpkin and then I use a big spoon that I've cut the handle off of and I scoop out the insides of the pumpkin.
And take your time because this is something that you hope will last.
The smoother the pumpkin, the less surfaces there are for bacteria and yucky stuff to grow on.
And then I'll carve the pumpkin.
I want to point out a few things that I think are important for everyone to consider when they're carving a jack-o'-lantern.
When you look at someone's face, the thing that makes them uniquely, them is not just two big holes for eyes and a big hole for a mouth.
It's their pupils, their eyebrows, their smile, their teeth things that make a person look like a person.
Also do very well to make a pumpkin look like a very cool pumpkin.
So I really recommend folks put pupils in their pumpkin.
I think that teeth are a really important thing.
I think eyebrows or nose or whiskers or even cutting out little slits for ears.
All those little extra things make a pumpkin a little bit more individual and a little bit more interesting.
And I think they're a lot more fun to carve.
And then we'll light it up.
One thing that we do that folks might not realize is we take a piece of parchment paper and we line the inside of the face.
We use staples to hold in the parchment paper.
And that does a couple of different things.
First, it diffuses the light.
So it doesn't make the light look like it's coming from a single light bulb.
It looks like the face is glowing completely evenly.
And the second thing is pumpkins begin to rot from the inside, but mold doesn't grow on parchment paper.
So even if your pumpkin gets dark and dingy and rotten on the inside, the face at night still looks like a pumpkin face.
Because inevitably, even though it's nice and cool today, in a couple of weeks it'll probably have a really warm day and we'll come home from work or from school and our pumpkins will be slumped over and tired and ready to go to bed.
George, thanks so much for joining us.
Listeners.
This year's Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular runs until November 1st and you can find more information at rwpzooorg.
This episode is sponsored by Sports Illustrated Kids.
And I'll see you next time.
It's the perfect way to inspire the young athlete or sports fan in your life.
Whether you're tackling dinner or dreaming of the big game, a sports illustrated kids subscription is a total touchdown.
Head over to si.com today to score your year long subscription for only 20 bucks.
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All right, it's time to reveal our mystery sound.
Let's hear it again one more time.
That's the sound of me cutting a hole in the top of a pumpkin and pulling off the lid.
Now that I've heard George's advice, maybe next time I'll try cutting off the bottom instead.
Thanks for playing along.
Thanks for listening to the Chop Chop podcast.
We've just launched the Chop Chop Substack newsletter, which is for grownups who are interested in teaching their kids to cook.
And we hope you'll join us there.
Go to chopchopfamily.substack.com and join the conversation.
This podcast is written produced, edited and hosted by Harry Rosenblum and Sally Sampson, with engineering by Matt Patterson.
Stella Maiden is our intrepid intern.
Extra special thanks this week to George Nikolopoulos and the Roger Williams Park Zoo Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular in Providence, Rhode Island.
Shout out to Frank and Ruben.
Thanks for adding your voices to our show.
Music in this episode by Lisa Hammer.
We're also a part of Kids Listen, the number one place for finding great podcasts for kids of all ages.
You can learn more at kidslisten.org.
And don't forget to sign up for the new Chop Chop sub stack to get more recipes in your inbox every week.
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Thanks for listening.
It takes a little bit to accept that, when you first start working at the show, to stand back and say, oh wow, I put so much time and so much effort into something and it's just falling apart.
But to me, it's a really great lesson about life.
There's something beautiful about the impermanence, but there's also something great about learning how to do something well and then doing it again, and doing it better the second time, and then doing it a third time and doing it a fourth time.
You know that pumpkin had its time and place in the world and I loved it when it was there, but now it's gone and onto the next.
So it does bring you a little bit of peace generally throughout your life when you can accept that about your pumpkins.
