Second Cousin to Wicked Good Pumpkin Seeds

Cut open top of pumpkin, roll up your sleeves, and remove all the slimy seeds from the innards of le pumpkin. Rinse them off as best you can, removing all the goo, etc.

Pre-heat oven to 300°.

Pull out a cookie sheet and spread the seeds over it. Take some olive oil, perhaps a tablespoon, and glomp it on top of the seeds. Mush the seeds around until they're well-coated with the oil.

Take about a tablespoon of garlic powder, and sprinkle it over the seeds. Mush around the seeds a bit to get the powder all over. Repeat with Lawry's Seasoned Salt. Mush mush mush. Spread the seeds out again, and then slide the sheet into the oven.

Bake for 45 minutes. Eat the seeds whole once they've cooled slightly. Salty and savory. Mmmm.

Nick from Blodnick:
Wicked Good Pumpkin Seeds

2 cups pumpkin seeds (Normally takes me a couple medium pumpkins, but one will do)
1 tsp Worcester sauce
3 tbsp butter
1 tsp salt

Gut pumpkin and make sure you get all the little goo things off the seeds.
Boil seeds in salted water for 10 min
Dry seeds on paper towel
Add Worcester sauce and salt to melted butter and mix till salt dissolves.
Add seeds
Stir til coated
Bake for 1-2 hours at 225°F checking and turning every 15 minutes until the seeds are crunchy and delicious, but not burned.
Toss pumpkin before it rots.

Guest loser Anya eats lunch on a budget:

Wake up late and throw on some mascara and tie your hair up, because, ya’ know, if you’re late again you will be living with moms again. Since you have no time to steal some ravioli from your loser roommate, run out the door and hope that your clothes match. Make it to work on time, catch up on your daily blogs and your email till around 9:30. Finally it’s noon, time for lunch!! Remember you don’t have jack to eat. Scrounge around in the freezer, find that old Lean Cuisine somebody left that’s been sitting in there since before you started a year ago. Nuke it for 8 minutes to try and evaporate some of the melted ice block that was attached. Discover, to your astonishment, that it is definitely nasty as hell. Decide to drive to Wendy’s to get a Jr. Bacon Cheese since you borrowed a dollar from your neighbor you pretend to like. Hope you don’t run out of gas on the way; thank god Wendy’s is only a block away.

This post is for hsbc

Totally vegetarian penne pasta


Take 4 oz. uncooked pasta, put it in a bowl. Take a big ol' pot, fill it with enough water that the pasta will be submerged and can swim around nicely in a big boil, and set it on your stove. Turn that burner on high, and salt the water a tiny bit.

Grab a couple portabella mushroom caps, about a cup and a half of water or vegetable broth, and a splash (two tablespoons or so) of red cooking wine, and set it on a brisk simmer on another burner. Crush some garlic - perhaps as much as a 1/3 of a bulb, put it in with the liquid the mushrooms are cooking in.

Water should be at a boil in the pot, so dump in the pasta. I used a whole wheat pasta, and even though it said 10 minutes, I am not much of an al dente girl, so I went for 15.

The portabella should be nice and cooked by now, so go ahead and transfer the liquid and the shrooms to the canister that should have been packaged with your stick blender. Blend the mushrooms and the garlic and the broth and the wine together, until you get this weird-looking sort of pesto goop out of it.

Drain the pasta, and put half of it into a shallow bowl. Dump half of your pesto stuff in it.

For added substance and protein, take a Boca smoked sausage (fake meat! mmm.), nuke it, or fry it up according to the packaging, then chop half of it into small pieces and throw that in with your dish.

Pack up the other half of everything and stick it in a container to bring to work tomorrow.

You guys. Help this poor girl out.

Dear Cooking Losers,

My roommates and I moved into a fab new house a couple months ago only to
discover that the people who lived here before us at planted, oh, five
million or so tomato plants in our yard. Why could someone possibly need SO
MANY tomatoes? I do not know. But they keep coming each and every day.

I have had ENOUGH of the salsa, the tomato sandwiches, the mozzarella
salads.. We're running out of ideas here. And so, I turn to you, cooking
losers, with a request. Please, please give me new and exciting ideas about
what I can make with this abundance of tomatoes before they all go bad.

Thank you much,
jennn

Beans. Rice. In the same place.

Find box of Zatarians long grain and wild rice in the pantry. Ignore for months since rice is the food of last resort, much like soup. Go broke. Consider box of rice again. Dig it out and discover a can of chili red beans.

so, you make the rice like it says on the box and about 15 minutes into the 25 that it's supposed to sit on the stove, you dump the can of beans in it. they're mild beans, so you liberally add some cayenne pepper to it. not great, but not half bad either.