Winnie and the great pumpkin

A friend at work gave me a pumpkin the other day, left over from Halloween with her kids. My intent was to whack it up, bake it, and make pumpkin puree so that I could make some of the yummy-looking pumpkin recipes that are all over the net right now.

But after wrestling the thing around the kitchen for ten minutes just trying to get it cut up and gutted, I cried 'uncle' and gave the bottom half to the bird. Winnie is about 5 inches tall, a small mean as a pit of snakes African red-bellied parrot with a bite like a barracuda, and the pumpkin was about 14" tall and in diameter, so the bottom half was huge and at first he was a little scared of it when I plunked it on top of his cage. But Winnie is nothing if not foolishly brave, so after a couple moments he climbed up onto the edge. He stayed up there for about 20 minutes, ripping hunks off the rind and flinging seeds around the kitchen and picking pumpkin slime off his feet. He didn't jump in and wade around the middle of it like he did with my plate of spaghetti last year and my bowl of cereal last week.

I made pumpkin fries (along with sweet potato fries) and pitched the rest over the fence for the wild critters. I'm sure homemade pumpkin puree is wonderful but I'll take mine in a can, thanks. My poor hands just can't handle the weight and gripping that goes into cutting up a big pumpkin.

See the big bite marks in the foreground? I have scars shaped just like that.

I got pumpkin slime on my feets.

That thing at bottom left is a flip-flop that he's been working on for a month or so.