halloween pumpkins, and goodbye VeganMofo!

Happy Halloween! This is one of my favorite holidays. Kevin and I carved pumpkins earlier this week so we could put them on the porch in the hopes of luring trick or treaters! (Since we moved this summer, we're not sure how many trick or treaters we're likely to get.)

Kevin's is on the left; mine is the cat on the right.

After we finished carving, Kevin roasted the seeds. I've tried this in the past and not had the best luck--the shells always stay too chewy. His recipe involves boiling the seeds first, which softens the shells.

 

They're really crunchy and tasty, without being too chewy. I was finishing up my pumpkin when he was making them, so I'm not sure what seasonings are on there; onion powder, cumin, and salt, maybe?

Finally, though this soup wasn't made from the pumpkins above, just last week we had a pumpkin soup that I made from a pie pumpkin we got in our CSA.

I added pea tendrils just after it finished cooking, which are another veggie we'd gotten in our CSA. I'd never cooked with pea tendrils before, but they were good! Served with some nutritional-yeasty bread and roasted chickpeas.

With this entry, we close out VeganMofo, the Vegan Month of Food. I hope you've enjoyed it! And have a great Halloween!

just in time for Halloween: creepiest island ever

I just found out about La Isla de las Munecas (the Island of the Dolls), and I can't believe I have't heard of it before today. In case you haven't heard of it either, let me share some information about this awesomely creepy place!

La Isla de las Munecas is an island on a lake near Mexico City. Its former resident, a hermit named Julian Santana, collected dolls and doll parts, altered them to make them creepier (as if old dolls weren't creepy enough!), and placed them all over the island. Some hang from trees, some sit on chairs, some crawl in the rafters, some lie on the ground and peek out of flowerbeds.

I've been reading about this island all morning. Julian Santana had a prodigious garden, and people would come to the island to trade dolls for his produce, so he could keep adding to his work. A young girl had drowned there years before, and Santana himself drowned there in 2001, plus the place looks creepy, so people think it must be haunted. Apparently it's been on one of those ghost-hunting TV shows!

You can see a lot more pictures, which are all amazing, and read more about Julian and about superstitions associated with the island, on these sites:

http://www.everywheremag.com/places/5452/page1

http://jacqui.instablogs.com/entry/don-julian-and-his-island-of-dolls/

http://blog.turisuna.com/la-isla-de-la-munecas-haunted-island-which-is-filled-with-creepy-dolls

Let me know if you find more authoritative information on the island; it's hard to come by.

I think the island and the concept are really cool and interesting. I like the aesthetics of most creepy things, so I am a little biased, but I say this is art. Maybe they just do it to add to the creepiness and not to talk down a man's 50 years of work, but almost all of the articles I read articles about la Isla de las Munecas make Julian Santana's work seem like the result of a mentally unbalanced man living alone--no one refers to him as an artist. But if Julian Santana had done this in a studio in Brooklyn or in San Francisco's Mission district, galleries would be beating down his door to get him to do installations for them.

And I would totally want to see said installations, like I totally want to see La Isla de las Munecas someday. In the meantime, if I'm ever looking for ideas for Halloween parties or haunted houses, I know whence to draw inspiration!

So what do you think? Is La Isla de las Munecas cool? Scary? Art? Would you go there?