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it is an ex-blog, it has ceased to be, it is pushing up the daises, it has breathed its final breathed, it has retreated from the land of the living, it is no more.

but, please visit the bastard child of this blog, my new and extra shiny blog which should in time contain many more similar acts of stupidity along with all sorts of other goodies.

so come along to njclarke.wordpress.com and check it out.

who knows it might even surpass this one by having more than one post on it.

The Great Vegetable Massacre

Every year millions of people across the world gather together at Halloween to carve pumpkins. but. as i saw the pumpkins piled up in sainsburys, suspiciously close to the watermelons an idea came to me.

What other vegetables work?

is there any reason why it needs to be a pumpkin?

so after pondering this for a while a plan appeared and very shortly after that my kitchen was filled with more than had ever been amassed there before.

A Fruity Hoard, oh and the potato and orange didnt make it, i got hungry.

I Assembled the following apparatus

Vegetable knife, bread knife, chopping board, spoon, bowl.

With everything set up i decided a control was necessary and started on a pumpkin.

A Small incision was made

The innards removed

Aarg my eye!

The completed pumpkin, simple, elegant, a modern classic...

The pumpkin went perfectly well, i had proved to myself that i was at least capable of that. Now it was time to start on the interesting stuff...butternut squash, as the most closely related vegetable i'd bought i thought it would be fairly simple.

Come on this thing looks stupid enough as it is.

So far so good

This stage was particularly hard, apparently butternut squash is mostly solid till you get to the bulbous seedy bit at the bottom, forcing me to adapt a complex knifey spooney technique to get the job done. then i realised my error at starting at the narrow end, getting the flesh out of the bottom was a serious task.

The outside was also rather brittle leading to a nasty crack down by the mouth.

Next up: The Gem Squash, never eaten one before, never seen one before, but it seemed to be a sort of mini pumpkin.

The skin was like leather, but once in was as i expected, like a mini pumpkin.

Raawr i am gem squash!

With the possibilities of the squash family pretty thoroughly explored it was time to move onto other types of veg.

Aubergine!

I really wasnt sure about this one, with no hard skin it was liable to fall apart.

Carving the inside out was fairly easy, until the very bottom when the shape gave me the same problems as with the butternut squash.

There wasnt much room inside for the candle, so we had to wedge it in on its side, the skin however was perfect for carving.

next i grabbed myself an apple

Fangtastic.....sorry..it was actually pretty tricky, i had to leave a fair bit of flesh in there in order to keep the sides rigid leaving barely any room for the candle

Pepper

This was probably the easiest of them all, its practically hollow any way and its so soft its easy to cut.

The group, so far. According to wikipedia "Throughout Ireland and Britain, there is a long tradition of carving lanterns from vegetables, particularly the turnip, mangelwurzel, or swede " this is of course, rubbish. it is utterly utterly impossible to carve a swede, turnips are actually too small and mangelwurzel....what the hell is a mangelwurzel?

i got about this far before giving up, it was just too bloody tough, i might as well have been trying to carve a solid lump of wood

thankfully however i happen to have one exceedingly determined flatmate who spent what must have been at least an hour attacking that accursed root vegetable.
Eventually the eyes and mouth began to emerge. Meanwhile i busied myself with a mango



The big seed thing in the middle was a real challenge to get out and i slightly mangled it a bit in the process

but eventually we began to get there

and thus the mang o lantern was created

Pineapple was next for the treatment

after dealing with some of the other fruits pineapple was a breeze to hollow out, despite the harder bits in the centre.
the nature of the skin made it difficult to carve, which explains the erm...rudimentary...carvings on this one.
and now....probably the one i was most looking forward too...the one that had the most promise...and the one that inspired the whole project. Watermelon...
the top came off without a hitch
It was probably easist of all to disembowel, although it did take a while to get all the juice out.
It was also really easy to carve stuff in. if anything easier than the pumpkin.
mmmm melon... around about here another of my flatmates appeared and began adding fancy bits to some of the fruit


at this point we stumbled upon a brilliant consequence of our activities.


Tropical fruit cocktails! made with the melon, mango and pineapple we didnt use...plus a fair bit of malibu.

Now suitably liquored up it was time to play with fire.

Watermelon


Butternut, This was impossibly hard to light.


The swede
Pumpkin, the spacious interior had room for three candles
apple, the main problem with this is that there wasnt enough air flow to keep the candle alight so we had to cut vents in the lid

Apple, melon and pineapple


heres the pumpkin with its gem squash minion. We had to cut a hole in the top of the gem squash as well, not because of air flow but because it kept threatening to catch fire

swede pineapple and melon

Aubergine

Apple


the pepper, as you can see it glowed red, which was thoroughly awesome.


pumpkin, aubergine, melon

after a while the wax from the aubergines candle began to drip out like the slavering drool of a demonic...vegetable


Mango


So, conclusions?

well the smaller ones didnt work too well, neither did the fleshy ones or the ones which didnt stand up on their own.

also..the smell of burning rotting mixed vegetables isnt all that pleasant


but still if theres one thing i shall take from this it is....forget pumpkins next time im going for a melon, its better in every way, and tastes better too.


Cheers to Nobby and Nat, and the rest of my flatmates for giving a hand/not thinking im mental.