How to cook pumpkin seeds – do not throw the seeds after carving a pumpkin Pumpkin seeds are very nutritious and make a tasty snack by themselves and can also be added to dishes like salads, cakes, bread, cookies etc. Once you have removed the seeds from the pumpkin, you should immediately wash them with a lot of water to get rid of the slimy strings clinging to them. Then spread out the pumpkin seeds on brown paper or on blotting paper. Leave the seeds overnight so that they become dry in the morning. The rest of the slimy stuff clinging to the seeds will shake off by itself once the seeds are dry.

There are many recipes on how to cook pumpkin seeds. Roasting or toasting the pumpkin seeds is one way to cook the seeds. Before cooking the pumpkin seeds you can soak them in salt water or water containing other herbs, overnight, to give them a good flavor. But the seeds have to be dried in order to cook them.

You can add pumpkin seeds to the batter or the dough while making cakes, cookies and bread. Alternatively you can add them to salads. One more way of cooking pumpkin seeds is to make a sauce with a tomato base with little basil in it and then add the hulled and roasted or raw hulled pumpkin seeds to the sauce. This sauce can be had with bread or rice.

Another way of cooking pumpkin seeds is to add some butter (or margarine) and salt to the seeds. You can also boil the seeds in salt water to give them an enhanced flavor. You can also and other flavors by baking the seeds using garlic salt or Worcestershire sauce. You can also add sugar, ginger and cumin instead of garlic salt and Worcestershire sauce. Other flavors which can be added to the pumpkin seeds include maple syrup, nutmeg, Tabasco sauce, honey, brown sugar etc.

You can also toast the pumpkin seeds in a skillet over a low flame. But you should take care that the seeds don’t get burned and hence keep stirring them regularly. In this method also a variety of flavors can be added to the pumpkin seeds.