Food Diary Number One

I want to take this time to talk to you about Pumpkins.

As part of my adult life in England I need to learn to adjust to all the cooking challenges here. If you've read some of my past blogs you know what I'm up against. But I can't keep making excuses, so it is time to get with the program. And as this blog is meant to document my adult life abroad, cooking in England falls under its jurisdiction. So here we go.

At the grocery store I got two sweet pumpkins, or cooking pumpkins. They are smaller than carving ones, and very orange and cute. I can't find canned pumpkin here, so I opted to try to use these for cooking. To get the pumpkin out of its rind, shell, skin, whatever it is technically called, I cut the pumpkin in half, scooped out the insides (saving the seeds to toast!) and then cut the remainder into big wedges. Then I microwaved it in a covered glass dish with water in the bottom for about 10 minutes. You could probably do it with less. Then I basically peeled the outside off. First I made pumpkin bread. I used this recipe that I found online from PickYourOwn.org:

Ingredients for Pumpkin Bread

 2 cups of fresh cooked pumpkin OR one 16 ounce can of canned pumpkin

 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (not self-rising flour)

 2 tsp. baking soda

 3 cups sugar or 3 cups of Splenda OR a 50:50 mix of the two.

 4 eggs, beaten

 1 cup vegetable oil

 1 and 1/2 tsp. salt

 2 tsp. cinnamon

 2 tsp. nutmeg

 1/2 teaspoon allspice

 1 cup chopped pecans (optional)

 1/2 cup raisins (also optional)

 Water:

1/2 cup water if you are using fresh cooked pumpkin OR 2/3 cup water if you are using commercial canned pumpkin

 Makes 2 loaves.

Pumpkin Bread Recipe

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.

2. In a large mixing bowl, stir together the flour, soda, salt, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg and sugar (or Splenda).

3. Add the eggs, water, oil and pumpkin.

4. Stir until blended.

5. If desired, add the raisins and/or nuts. Mix well, either by hand or with a mixer.

6. Pour into two lightly greased and floured 9x5" loaf pans.

7. Bake approximately 1 hour at 350 F. The test for doneness is the knife test: when a clean knife can be stuck in and removed cleanly.

8. Remove from the oven and cool slightly (10 minutes).

9. Then take out of pans to let cool on a rack.

Jo's Process

So, to cook the pumpkin I just used the microwaved pumpkin from before, it was soft already, so I just scooped any extra water that had separated itself out from the pumpkin and then used my immersion blender to mash it up.

I don't know why anyone would use Splenda in a bread recipe. Or any recipe. But 3 cups of sugar sounded like a lot, I only used two slightly overfull cups.

I didn't have allspice so I just used a dash more cinnamon, and I didn't use any raisins or nuts.

Aaaaaand I didn't pay attention to the "makes 2 loaves" part until I had made all the batter. Oops. That part is important, especially if you have one loaf pan.

Anyway, so I made all those changes to the recipe. It still went together just fine. I had my fancy cutting board counter saver thing that I got from Harrods when I was shopping there in London with my parents during their June visit. I call him Harrod. Anyway, Harrod has all the cooking temperature and measurement conversions from US to UK and European, its nice. So Hector told me that 350F is 180C, so I preheated the oven. I greased and floured my one bread pan and poured half the batter in. The rest I left in the saran wrap covered bowl in the fridge until the next night (this was just as we were packing for the move and I was too tired to bake the second one right away, and plus I got distracted watching Top Gun). When I baked the loaves it actually took more like an hour and 20 minutes. But despite all my changes it worked SO WELL. I was really excited. I took that loaf out of the pan so I could use the pan again the next night for the rest of the batter. By that time I had already packed my flour away, so I just greased the pan, but it didn't cause any problems at all.

So in conclusion, this is a totally fool proof recipe. You can do almost anything to it and it will come out perfectly. I'm saving this recipe!

To continue the pumpkin extravaganza, I made pumpkin soup. I LOVE soup, and I knew at the outset that I wouldn't know how much pumpkin the two pumpkins would yield, so I needed a recipe to pair with the pumpkin bread that didn't need to be exact. Thus, soup. I looked at a lot of recipes online and didn't like any of them, so I made one up!

Ingredients for Jo's Veggie Pumpkin Soup

_Whatever pumpkin you have around

_Carrots

_Celery

_White onion

_Zucchini

_one vegetable stock cube and water, or liquid vegetable stock

_pepper

_one pot with lid and an immersion blender

For this pumpkin I wanted it steamed enough to be able to remove the skin, but not have it go all totally mushy, since I needed it to hold up with the other vegetables and not get all zapped of its flavor. So I again steamed it the same way in the covered glass, but for about 8 minutes, and again, you could probably do less. I think I got what was probably about a cup and a half or two cups of pumpkin, but I made the amount of pumpkin the independent variable and made the amounts of all the other vegetables proportional to it.

I chose my vegetables with only a little thought. Carrots for color and texture, and because I like them. I used about one large handful of carrot, cut into kinda thin slices. Then I used a shallow handful of celery, since I didn't want the soup to get too bitter or too watery. I chopped that thicker since it would take less time than the carrots to cook, so each chunk was about the thickness of my thumb. Then white onion, I used a little more than half of a medium sized onion, I love onion but I didn't want to risk it overpowering the pumpkin so I limited myself. That I just chopped into quarters. And finally the zucchini. I used about half of a large zucchini, cut in half again and then quartered, since it would cook quickly. I just wanted that in there to thicken the soup up without changing the taste. I chose not to peel mine and it left little green flecks in the finished soup after it was blended, which I found really fun, but if you want it to be all one nice orangy-yellow color you should peel the zucchini.

All of this I threw into a large pot. I heated 3/4 cup of water and mixed the vegetable stock cube into it so it would dissolve, then poured this over the vegetables. Less water if you want thicker soup, more for runnier, duh. Then I just used a few shakes of pepper on it, covered, and simmered it on a mediumish heat for a while. I say a while because I didn't actually time it. I periodically stirred it, and when I did I would poke the carrot, the hardest thing in there, to see how soft it was. When it was soft but before it went mushy I took it off the heat, let it sit for a minute because my blender doesn't like piping hot things, and then used the immersion blender again to mush it into a creamy soup. This made about enough for four good servings, but again, that wasn't intended, it was just what the amount of pumpkin allowed. I thought it was great, just tasted like vegetables. I'm sure you could find more creative recipes, with different veggies and more interesting spices laid out in actual flavor profiles, many I found online had cream in them... but I just wanted a really unfancy healthy one, so stick with this if you are going for a really vegetabley soup. Or use this as a base and add some other flavors to it.

And look Mom! Its vegan!!!

Well, I hope this is useful to someone. I was really excited to have two successes in one evening. And hooray for fall pumpkin season!

Shout out to the start of ballroom dance season tomorrow, and the official start of the term.