Don't bin your carved pumpkin: free recipes from the Food Partnership

Pumpkins and squash are in season, and Brighton & Hove Food Partnership^1,2,3,4 has put a set of free recipes online for them. It also has advice on eating the pumpkin you carve instead of throwing it away.

The Sussex in Season: Pumpkins post includes a pumpkin and kidney bean curry, squash parmigiana, butternut squash with quinoa and herbs, miyan taushe (a Nigerian pumpkin stew) and a Middle Eastern mince-stuffed pumpkin. Ingrid from Sussex Surplus⁵ gave her recipe for pumpkin gnocchi with sage butter. Sussex Surplus turns unsellable produce from local farms into soups and meals, and rescues hundreds of kilos of pumpkin every year.

Every October, the post says, thousands of pumpkins are bought for carving and many end up in the bin. The waste tips come from Food Use Places, a project of 18 organisations working together across Sussex to reduce food and packaging waste.

Start with the seeds. The toasted seeds recipe puts two handfuls of pumpkin seeds and two of sunflower seeds in a heavy frying pan over a medium flame until they brown and pop. Then a few shakes of tamari or light soy sauce. They crisp up again as they cool.

Half a pumpkin goes into the vegetable crumble, which serves four, with whatever root veg you have and a topping of wholemeal flour, oats and butter.

If the pumpkin is past eating, take off any candles, decorations or other non-natural bits and put it in your home compost bin or food waste collection.

The recipes can also be picked up at Sompting Pumpkins⁶, a pick-your-own farm on Halewick Lane in Sompting, open 10am to 4pm until 31 October.