Pumpkin Fun

Today was busy for Windmill. One of the major messages that we want to pass on is about sustainability, and pumpkins are often a huge source of waste, so we were delighted to lure groups in with the promise of pumpkins to carve, and then use the chance to show them the fantastic food that can be made from these  versatile fruits.

Our morning group was the Young Carers - children who act as carers for members of their families. We started with a cooking session, and the children helped to make pumpkin pancakes.

The Young Carers team up to make pumpkin pancakes.

Mel and Dan take a turn cooking the pumpkin soup.

Then, the group got down to cleaning out and carving their pumpkins, whilst the regular volunteers created a pumpkin soup, and everyone tried pumpkin pudding (pumpkin pie without the crust).

Starting on the designs.

The finished pumpkin lanterns - ready to go home to be scraped out to make more pancakes!

The children had a great time, and really enjoyed trying out their carved pumpkins with a torch in the darkened shed. We hope we can see the Young Carers again - they were a lovely group and we had a lot of fun with them.

The Young Carers with their pumpkins.

We were due to have a group from Bilborough Family Centre visiting for the afternoon, but the forecast was for heavy rain, and the site was soaking after a night's heavy rain. If the polytunnel had been intact, we would have run the session, but since we've not had chance to re-cover it yet, we had nowhere for small children to warm up and dry out, so we reluctantly decided to move the session to the family centre instead.

Yum - pumpkin!

We still managed to run many of the planned activities, with pumpkin pudding and soup to taste, a trail of pumpkins to find and a chance to find out how huge the world's largest pumpkin really is (1818.5 pounds / 826.6 kg), by finding out how many times your weight would be needed to equal it.

 Lots of pumpkins were carved by keen children and parents, and many recipe sheets were taken away by eager folk who had enjoyed the food, and were now interested in scraping out the flesh of the pumpkins as well as using them as lanterns.

We finished off with a pumpkin story and a promise that next time we'll meet a Bilborough Family Centre group, it will be at Windmill.