A number of years ago I discovered the joy of a pineapple jack-o’lantern, and frankly, we have not looked back! These little guys are so easy to carve and their crazy pineapple top hair make me laugh every time. Last weekend my son and I shot a short video on how to carve a pineapple jack-o’lantern. This video comes to you from the beautiful kitchen at our Kamaole Sands 2-206 condo. Hope you enjoy!
I wrote more about pineapples (how to carve and how to grow) last week – so check out that blog entry. I’ve also grown pineapples from pineapple tops in my flower bed, so search ‘Cara’s pineapple‘ on this blog for more pictures of that also!
A few tips for carving a pineapple jack-o’lantern
- On Maui a pineapple jack-o’lantern will only last about a day before starting to mold. Save your carving for Halloween afternoon! For that matter, when I have carved pumpkins here on Maui, they’ve not lasted much longer than 2-3 days either.
- Carving pineapples is significantly easier than a pumpkin – provided you trust your children with a knife, this is a fun activity for them to try!
- Pineapple jack-o’lanterns are juicy. Unless they’re outside, put a plate under them!
Pumpkins on Hawaii
Why not carve a pumpkin? Honestly, pumpkins in Hawaii are expensive. The actual pumpkins themselves, but also canned pumpkin. Standard (15 oz)-sized tins average $3, the larger (29 oz) ones are usually $5-6. Our family loves pumpkin. My favorite recipe is this pumpkin swirl loaf. It is delicious – I triple the recipe, usually two loaves are polished off within two days, the third goes in the freezer for a treat. This year I bought a whole pumpkin from Costco, roasted it and made my own pumpkin sauce (and seeds). I may have regretted that by the time I started bagging all the sauce for the freezer. That’s a lot of pumpkin sauce! It also looks deceptively like frozen mango puree. Want to bet there will be some interesting ‘mango’ aka accidental pumpkin smoothies made at my house? Ha!
Have you been to the Kula Farms upcountry Maui? Every year they have a pumpkin patch, usually starting late September and running through Halloween. I love their farm stand.
This fall Mahi Pono harvested their first crop of Maui grown pumpkins. Mahi Pono is the owner of 41,000 acres of former sugar cane land here on Maui. Slowly but surely they are converting the dry former sugar cane fields into cropland. Their first plantings were potatoes, but they have branched out from that. Driving up Haleakala Hwy you can see fields of orange, lemon and coffee trees. Curious to buy their Maui grown produce? Per their website they currently sell under the Maui Harvest label at Foodland, Longs, Times and Tamura.
