Happy Owloween!

For Halloween this year I wanted to let my birder and naturalist colors fly. So instead of the usual face on my pumpkin, I decided to carve something appropriately spooky but more from the natural world.

I started a Pinterest board to collect patterns and ideas. Let me tell you, there are some seriously talented pumpkin carvers out there! I found a lot of very intricate patterns-- gorgeous, but I knew I needed to be less ambitions. So I kept looking for something simpler.

I admired lots of bat silhouettes, cats, and spiders before finally spotting a lovely silhouette of an owl with full moon. It looked like getting the exact angle of the shoulders might be tricky, but was still a simple enough shape that I might have a chance at success. I found it in a DIY Network article pin-- the art itself is copyright Paper & Pigtails for DIY Network. I saved the image and resized it to fit my already-purchased pumpkin.

Once I had the size right, I created a stencil by razoring out the negative space. Next I taped the stencil onto my hollowed-out pumpkin and traced the design on with a marker.

I ended up using two knives to carve this pumpkin. One large one for cutting the top off the pumpkin and for taking out big chunks in the design, then a smaller one for finer details and better shaping, like to get my moon actually round, and to refine my owl's eartufts.

I ended up omitting a few details that were too intricate for my knife skills. But I think I came pretty close, and my owl is definitely still recognizable!

My freshly carved pumpkin

The next day, the owl had started to tip over outside of the pumpkin, so we fastened it to the side with a toothpick.  This is something I would note for future carvers-- the tenuousness of the carved owl's connection to the rest of the pumpkin. You may want to strengthen or reinforce the owl right away, rather than wait for it to fall over first.

I liked the design so much I took the stencil and also used it as a Halloween window decoration. We put it behind purple tissue paper and shone a flashlight on it to create this look:

The purple glow is very spooky, don't you think?

I do have one thing to admit, however. Although I love eating crunchy roasted pumpkin seeds, the last few years I've saved my pumpkins' seeds with the intention of roasting them. But then weeks later I still haven't done it,  and the seeds have grown mold in my fridge. Blech! So this year I decided to skip the moldy fridge step and dump all the seeds and pulp into my compost bin. Who knows, maybe next summer one of the seeds will sprout and I'll have volunteer pumpkins by next Halloween!

Cool facts about Great Horned Owls, the species I think is depicted here:

• They eat skunks! This owl's poor sense of smell actually benefits it when time comes to make dinner from a pungent skunk. It's even been reported that some of these owls leave the smell of a skunk behind on remnants of other prey. 
• They nest very early in the season. If you live in Great Horned Owl territory and appropriate habitat, you could try putting up a nesting box for these large owls in your back yard. The Nestwatch project from Cornell Lab of Ornithology offers plans for building and posting one if you're interested. 
• Often, though, a Great Horned Owl pair just takes over an old nest built by another species, as did the pair that I saw in Boyd Hill Nature Preserve, St. Petersburg, Florida last year. (I included the nest in my year-end eBird wrapup post.)

Stay tuned for my attempts to turn the pumpkin into a set of bird and squirrel feeders.

How to make Homemade Hot Sauce

My very own hot sauce!

After years of growing hot peppers, I finally tried making my very own hot sauce this fall. I did lots of research online, reading chili grower message boards and perusing dozens of recipes from Pinterest and my favorite food blogs. Finally I felt like I had a good enough idea to give it a shot.

The pepper I grow is called Hot Lemon and has a faint citrus-y flavor under its heat. So I decided to make a vaguely tropical hot sauce with lemon juice, ginger, and pineapple. 

Ingredients for a fiery golden hot sauce!

Ingredients:

8-10 oz fresh hot peppers, rinsed and stemmed

3 inches of fresh gingerroot, peeled and cut into coins

2 C water

juice of two lemons (I had about ½ C)

enough white vinegar to make 1 C when combined with the lemon juice

½ large sweet onion, diced

½ C canned crushed pineapple

salt to taste (I used ½ tsp)

Instructions:

Saute peppers, ginger, & onion. I might have browned mine too much; the finished sauce was darker than I hoped.

Saute the peppers, onion, and ginger in a bit of olive oil for 5 minutes on high.

Next, add the water and simmer until water is mostly evaporated, 20-30 minutes.

When the water has evaporated, set the pepper mixture aside to cool.

Simmering

Nicely evaporated.

Combine the pepper mixture and the rest of the ingredients in a blender or food processor. Puree.

Taste (cautiously!! Have some milk handy to quench the fire in your mouth and cleanse your palate between tastings). Add a bit of salt if you want, maybe more pineapple. The amount of fire will depend on the type of pepper you use. Hot Lemons are pretty darn hot, not the level of habaneros but I think hotter than jalapenos, ounce for ounce.

Yum, pepper puree!

Next, pour the slurry into a fine mesh strainer set over a bowl, to strain out the solids. It will probably take a while, even if you work on pressing the mixture with the back of a spoon or a rubber spatula like I did. My mixture was so thick we let it strain overnight to make sure we got all the liquid out.

So thick the liquid needed to strain overnight.

Finally, pour the liquid into jars. I had hoped for color a little more sunny than what resulted; in hindsight maybe I shouldn’t have let the peppers brown quite as much. That probably wouldn't matter so much if my peppers were red to start with. 

I’m storing my hot sauce in the fridge; I’m sure you could also process bottles in a hot water bath to make them shelf-stable without refrigeration. We also saved the solids in a separate container. A tiny bit of the fresh solids in stir-fry was quite nice; we may dehydrate and powder them as a spice mix too.

Why yes, I did put the hot sauce in antique glass vials.

 

So how did it turn out? Quite hot. Much hotter than either Tabasco or Franks’s hot sauces, two of the commercial hot sauces that are regulars on our table. Honestly I can’t taste the lemonyness as much as I’d hoped because it’s so fiery. Maybe next time I’ll use a smaller batch of hot peppers but keep the liquid the same. I know the ginger adds a lot of fire too, so I’ll think about reducing that next time. But it’s still really good! Not perfect but I wouldn’t hesitate to offer this to my snootiest of hot sauce-loving friends.

After using the sauce for a couple of weeks we also decided it needs a bit more something, maybe garlic or even a dry spice like ground coriander seeds. Next time! This recipe still makes a good basic hot sauce with room for improvising.

Oh, another note: when we were making the hot sauce and tasting it for salt and such, we just had it straight, dabbing the tip of a finger into the sauce and onto our tongue. I mentioned having milk available to calm your palate between tests; I wish we had made rice or something to taste the hot sauce on, rather than just having the sauce all by itself. That would probably have made it easier to judge whether other flavors were needed beneath the heat.