April 28th: pumpkin curry soup

Greg upgraded to a new iPhone. I took over his old iPhone, upgrading from my out of date, slidey-keyboard style cell phone, whose slidey-keyboard keys stopped working 18 months ago. All of which to say is, I've been lazy about taking pictures with our camera and have instead been using my new-to-me-iPhone. That's my up front excuse about the bad picture below.

The recipe, though, is delish! I bought a can of pumpkin last week to make pumpkin muffins, and made this soup recipe to use up the rest of the pumpkin. It is chowdery-tasting, and I heaped in the sour cream at eating time, yum yum yum. From December 2010's Today's Parent: Pantry Pumpkin Soup. If anything, next time, I would add more veggies or some chicken, or both.

October 21st: pumpkin gnocchi

I probably wouldn't have kept or written about this recipe except that Olivia loved it and ate two bowls, so her opinion wins out over mine in this case. Greg went away for a boys' weekend, so it was just me and O cooking up a delicious storm this weekend, and cook we did!


I made this recipe to use up some of our leftover pumpkin purée from the pumpkin cakes. From October 2011's Chatelaine: Pumpkin Gnocchi. It's really half pumpkin/half potato gnocchi, and somewhere between pasta and dough in taste and texture. Gnocchi is surprisingly easy to make, and cooks really quickly, with just a few minutes of boiling. I served it as suggested, with the sage butter, which I was really surprised O liked. I think I could have thrown some tomato sauce on there instead and she would have been over the moon.

1/3 of dough rolled and cut.

Cooked gnocchi with sage butter.

The recipe makes a lot (6 servings) and I only cooked 1/3 of the dough, so we have more in the freezer to cook up another day. I think I will try tomato sauce next time to see the reaction.


I served the gnocchi as a side dish (it's pretty dense) with French chicken and peaches as the main. Unbelievably, Olivia preferred the gnocchi over the peaches. This kid usually eats fruit before all else.

October 19th: pumpkin orzo

With quite a bit of pumpkin still to go, even having made two pumpkin cakes, October 2011's Chatelaine came in handy, with a couple of pumpkin recipes to try out. First up: pumpkin orzo. Although it looks soupy in the picture below, it is really somewhere between soup and pasta. This recipe also provided an excellent opportunity to use some of my post-Thanksgiving turkey stock. In the end we didn't love the recipe, but it was good, and made an ever-so-slight dent in the pumpkin purée supply.


Pumpkin Orzo


1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion,  chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 cup orzo
1/4 cup pumpkin purée
1 tsp dried crumbled sage
1  1/2 cups chicken broth
salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Parmesan cheese


Heat olive oil in medium pot over medium heat. Cook onion until starting to soften, 3-4 minutes, being careful not to burn. Add garlic and cook for 1 minute more. Stir in orzo, then pumpkin purée and sage. Add chicken broth and increase heat to bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer until orzo is tender, 5-8 minutes. Taste and add salt and pepper if required. Top with Parmesan.


Makes 2 servings.

Served with raw veggies and boiled salted edamame.
Parmesan cheese for topping the pasta/soup.

October 16th/19th: pumpkin cake

In our last trip to the farm, we picked up a blemish free, perfectly round pie pumpkin. Olivia requested pumpkin pie; I suggested pumpkin cake. She wasn't sure at first, but came around to the idea eventually. We ended up making pumpkin cake, roasted pumpkin seeds, pumpkin orzo, pumpkin gnocchi and still had pumpkin left over. That little pumpkin had some bang for its buck.


First up: cake from epicurious: Spiced Pumpkin Layer* Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. (*Layer cake too much bother. I made two 8" square cakes and froze one.) I altered this recipe ever so slightly, reducing the sugar from 2 cups to 1 1/2 cups and replacing 1 cup oil with 1/2 cup oil and 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce. Everyone who had this cake raved about it. I thought it was good too. The icing doesn't have a tonne of sugar, and tastes more cream cheesy than sweet. It's good though.


But just so we're clear. Nothing is as good as Shannon G's carrot cake.


Day 1

First, one must start with a pumpkin.

Scrub pumpkin. Slice in half. Remove seeds; save if wanted. Discard pulp.

Bake. Water 1/2 " up the sides of pumpkin. Oven at 450°F. 45-60 minutes. 
(Please don't judge my oven. I'm a cook, not a cleaner.)

Cool. Scoop out flesh. Purée.

Strain. You are now ready to cook.

Day 2

Gather supplies.

Bake cakes (see link above for recipe, plus modifications).

Set child to work making icing.

Completed product: note flecks of orange (pumpkin) in icing.

Ratio of icing:cake not too shabby.

Eat for days on end. Reap the praise.

December 19th: Buttermilk Pumpkin Pancakes

(Breakfast post.) If you're like me and have some pumpkin in your freezer you'd like to use up, I might recommend this pancake recipe from Cooking With My Kid: Buttermilk Pumpkin Pancakes. Olivia and I made these for breakfast this morning and it was a tasty way to start the day, without being too sweet. Full disclosure: I used one cup white flour and one cup whole wheat, although the recipe calls for two of the latter. Bonus: now I have enough pancakes in the freezer to feed Olivia breakfast en route to gymnastics for all of January, and maybe a little longer!

November 3rd: Roasted-vegetable salad + Caramelized pumpkin seeds

Verdict:
Try Again: Roasted-vegetable salad & Caramelized pumpkin seeds

Tonight's supper recipe is a re-try from November 2009's Chatelaine: Roasted-vegetable salad. It's getting a re-try status again because I'm not feeling in top form tonight and didn't entirely enjoy supper. I think it was me though, not the recipe. G&O ate it up. We do make this one with a few modifications: using just carrots and not parsnips (I've tried and tried and can't bring myself to like parsnips), using spinach and not kale (a whole 142 g of spinach), and deleting the chickpeas or beans. We're not big fans of the legumes around here, although I do try to incorporate them into our diet occasionally. I do add goat cheese and toasted pine nuts to this salad, which is a guaranteed combo to make any meal better. Mm mm.

Did I mention this is our vegetarian meal of the week?

Late night snacktime. While scooping seeds from my pie pumpkin on the weekend, I couldn't help but notice how much smaller the seeds were than jack-o-lantern pumpkin seeds. I was curious: could I make tasty roasted pumpkin seeds? I've tried my hand at roasting seeds a few times, with a success rate of nil. Since I was making my pumpkin oatmeal from the Cooking with my Kid blog, I decided to try her Caramelized pumpkin seeds recipe too.

First of all, I think the term "caramelized" gets used too loosely on a regular basis. These seeds are in no way caramelized. They are toasted and then sugared. End of story. No long, slow cooking in sugar so that the sugar become syrupy and coats the seeds with an even, sticky layer of caramel. I come across this misnomer often in my constant seeking out of recipes.

But I digress. These pumpkin seeds are pretty good! Better than any I've made before. It's important to note that all the cooking comes in the first part of the recipe; once you add the sugar, the cooking is done. So you want to make sure your pumpkin seeds are perfect for eating before you move to the second step. I say all this because I think I should have cooked mine a smidgen longer, and I'm now wondering if half-cooked pumpkin seeds are difficult to digest. Time will tell.

October 31st: pumpkinny oatmeal + pumpkin biscotti + Tuscan chicken & pasta

Verdict:
Try Again: oatmeal, biscotti and chicken and pasta

I love Halloween. Maybe my favourite of all the holidays. Candy. Costumes. No pressure. Love it.

We started our day with the first snow fall of the year! Olivia was so excited when she saw the snow: "Snow on my deck. Snow on my BBQ. Snow on the trees. Snow on the ground." (It went much, much longer.)

Then: "I need my snow suit." So, before breakfast, still in pajamas, into her snowsuit she went and outside to have some fun. Meanwhile, I needed to get to work on a Liam-inspired recipe. Another one from Cooking With My Kid: Baked Pumpkin Oatmeal. Based on Liam's advice, I upped the amount of liquid (milk) and flavour (ground ginger, ground cloves, walnuts and raisins), all of which contributed to a delicious (though late) breakfast. While it baked, we had to eat breakfast, so when it was done we were actually not hungry. It was good though.

One of Liam's problems with this recipe was that the pumpkin flesh didn't cook enough. Trying to remedy that, I filled the pumpkin with water and put it in the oven as the oven preheated and as I prepared the filling. I don't know if it made a difference, but thought I should mention it.

We have a lot of leftovers; we'll see how those taste. The flesh at the bottom of the pumpkin cooked quite well. I chunked up some of the leftover flesh that was a little harder, tossed it back in the oven with some water, and used it to make, from October 2010's Chatelaine: Pumpkin-Spice Biscotti. This is very good stuff, and makes a lot. To work with me tomorrow it shall go.

After trick-or-treat-ing, we had for supper the last recipe I am trying from October 2010's Chatelaine: Tuscan Chicken with fresh pasta. The recipe calls for turkey but I used chicken. It also calls for scallopini and I used breasts (which increased the cooking time). And finally, it calls for wine and I used chicken broth. The fresh pasta nests (and I just bought PC brand, nothing fancy) were amazing! I think it was the buttery sauce. I thought the chicken was just okay but Greg loved it. Olivia was not digging the sage leaves.

We'll try all of these recipes again, except, maybe, the oatmeal. We'll see how those leftovers taste and then decide. A good weekend, a good day, and a good night. :)




October 24th: chicken divan, peekaboo muffins, cheesecake bars

Verdict:
Try Again: chicken, muffins, cheesecake

Sunday usually finds me cooking and baking up a storm, and Olivia likes to help out. Liam brought this Cooking With My Kid blog to my attention, and I saw a recipe I wanted to try out: Peekaboo Jam Muffins. Mini muffins with jam in the middle; what more could a kid want? Olivia's jobs, when baking, include dumping/pouring ingredients into bowls, sometimes stirring (can be disastrous!) and, her favourite, putting paper liners in the muffin pan.

I stuffed the muffins with three different types of jam/jelly, and the best kind was some raspberry jelly that Grandma gave me when we visited this past summer.

The jelly had the strongest flavour, which stood out the best in the completed muffins.

For supper tonight, I went real fancy and cooked up a Campbell's Soup recipe: Easy Chicken and Broccoli Divan. Shannon may recall cooking this for us last year when she lived with us temporarily (come back!). We had this with some tri-colour fusilli and salad. This is a pretty good recipe, but I would make one change: no need to cook the broccoli in advance; it just ends up mushy. I'm wondering if you could get away with not cooking the chicken in advance either. It's not clear to me why it needs to be done.

Finally, my treat for the week: from October 2010's Chatelaine: Pumpkin & chocolate cheesecake bars. I ate one of these tonight while they were still warmish, and I liked it. We'll see how they are tomorrow after firming up in the refrigerator. The candied ginger (love it!) in the crust is the most powerful flavour in these; if you're not a ginger fan, leave it out!