Pepper Jack-O-Lanterns

Foremost among ancient symbols and practices of Halloween is the carving of Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns, a hollowed-out pumpkin given fanciful facial features, sometimes comical and more frequently frightening. It's something children wait for, and making a good one can take a considerable amount of time and effort. It can take a lot of strength to cut through a thick pumpkin rind and quite a bit of effort to remove the pulp and seeds and scrape the insides clean.

For those parents with impatient children, here's a way to make quick and easy little jack-o-lanterns, ones that can be completed in a couple of minutes with very little effort. Because they're so simple to construct, they can be made by children (as always, of course, supervised by an adult when using cutting implements). They're little, so they can be placed almost anywhere, and they're cheap to make, so kids can experiment with a variety of scary faces.

The trick is to use something other than a pumpkin. We had instant success when we tried it on a pepper. That's right: a regular green or red or yellow pepper. It's easy to carve, the innards can be removed in a second or two-no laborious scraping-and, if a mistake is made, it's easy enough to just move on to another pepper.

Begin in the supermarket by picking out a few nice-looking peppers. We are speaking about ordinary peppers of the kind used in salads or stuffed peppers; no hot peppers, otherwise the chemical that causes the spicy taste will get into small cuts and sensitive areas like the eyes with painful results. Look for each to have at least one side wide enough to hold the facial features you'd like to give it.

Once you're home, rinse a pepper under cold water, and then use a knife to cut around the stem in a circular manner. If the pepper is one that will sit upright with the stem up, slant the cut inward so the cap can be replaced later. When done, grab the stem and pull, and most of the insides, covered with little seeds, will come away with it. Any seeds that remain can be shaken out; an ordinary table knife will suffice for scraping out any extraneous matter from the inside.

You'll note from the pepper's shape that some peppers will stand upright the best when sitting upside-down; in other words, stem downward. In that case, simply discard the stem piece that you've cut out.

Carve a face on the side: mouth, nose and eyes will be all you'll need. You're working on a smaller scale than most pumpkins offer, and it won't take any time at all to complete the face. Just remember that if the pepper jack-o-lantern you're working on will be displayed with the top, or stem, end downward, you'll carve the mouth closest to that end and the eyes the furthest away.

That's all there is to it. You've created a small but scary Halloween jack-o-lantern, and your watching child will want to try one now. You may end up with quite a collection, but they won't go to waste because you can always cut them up into a salad, sauce or other meal when you're done with them.

Peppers come in a wide variety of shapes and colors-long and skinny, fat and round, green, red or yellow-so each miniature jack-o-lantern will be a unique creation. They may not be completely traditional, but they're so easy to make that they'll become a new tradition in your family, one your children will remember and enjoy every time this ancient, haunted holiday celebration occurs.

Article provided by Homesteader