Harvest Feast!
In our quest to a) savor the flavors of autumn and b) use every bowl and pan in the apartment at least once, Steve and I created a fall mini-feast of Italian Sausage Soup, mulled apple cider, and homemade pumpkin bread with cream cheese frosting. The soup recipe came from allrecipes.com, and included zuccini, Great Northern beans, and spinach. It was spicy (just the way I like it!) and, similar to the tomato-bacon soup we made last week, that's probably thanks to leaving the fat drippings from frying the sausage in with the soup. I've decided that is the best way to make soup with meat (albiet probably not the healthiest!). Definitely gives a more robust flavor to the broth.
I came out of the pumpkin bread project with two important thoughts. The first is a meditation on gluten-free cooking in general. We do most of our baking from a HUGE GF cookbook given to me by my awesome roommate: 1000 Gluten-Free Recipes, by Carol Fenster. It is an amazing book, and I highly reccommend it to anyone who is living gluten-free. The basic flour blend Carol promotes is made up of rice flour, sorghum flour, and potato or corn starch. Usually Steve and I used potato flour (which we just recently figured out isn't the same as potato starch - ooops) but a recipe for zuccini bread a few weeks back had me thinking otherwise. The amount of cornstarch in the zuccini bread recipe was ridiculous, but it made the bread very light and spongy - the perfect texture for a dessert bread. We achieved the same result using the cornstarch in the pumpkin bread flour blend. SO now I think cornstarch is going to be a mainstay in my pantry specifically for breads and muffins.
The other thought on pumpkin was how to get it from scratch. I hardly ever work with pumpkin, and so usually just get a can of it. Steve was set on using a real one though (and I was excited to cook up some tasty pumpkin seeds!) so we bought a small sugar pumpkin. At first we were thinking it would be easy: Cut in half, pop in oven to soften, scoop out tasty pumpkin insides. But it proved more difficult than expected. Cutting the pumpkin up was a nightmare! It must not have been particularly ripe either, because it took alot of brawn to scoop out the stringy insides. Then we found out the oven method would take over an hour, and we wanted to actually *eat* the pie that night. Thankfully we used the internet to find out how to steam it in the microwave. It only took 15 minutes and worked really well - it was so squishy we didn't even have to puree it using a food processor. Plus we only needed 1 cup of pumpkin guts, so we've got 2 or so cups left over in the freezer for other baking projects. In the end, it felt really good to have used basically the entire pumpkin and have bread made completely from scratch. Delicious!
I came out of the pumpkin bread project with two important thoughts. The first is a meditation on gluten-free cooking in general. We do most of our baking from a HUGE GF cookbook given to me by my awesome roommate: 1000 Gluten-Free Recipes, by Carol Fenster. It is an amazing book, and I highly reccommend it to anyone who is living gluten-free. The basic flour blend Carol promotes is made up of rice flour, sorghum flour, and potato or corn starch. Usually Steve and I used potato flour (which we just recently figured out isn't the same as potato starch - ooops) but a recipe for zuccini bread a few weeks back had me thinking otherwise. The amount of cornstarch in the zuccini bread recipe was ridiculous, but it made the bread very light and spongy - the perfect texture for a dessert bread. We achieved the same result using the cornstarch in the pumpkin bread flour blend. SO now I think cornstarch is going to be a mainstay in my pantry specifically for breads and muffins.
The other thought on pumpkin was how to get it from scratch. I hardly ever work with pumpkin, and so usually just get a can of it. Steve was set on using a real one though (and I was excited to cook up some tasty pumpkin seeds!) so we bought a small sugar pumpkin. At first we were thinking it would be easy: Cut in half, pop in oven to soften, scoop out tasty pumpkin insides. But it proved more difficult than expected. Cutting the pumpkin up was a nightmare! It must not have been particularly ripe either, because it took alot of brawn to scoop out the stringy insides. Then we found out the oven method would take over an hour, and we wanted to actually *eat* the pie that night. Thankfully we used the internet to find out how to steam it in the microwave. It only took 15 minutes and worked really well - it was so squishy we didn't even have to puree it using a food processor. Plus we only needed 1 cup of pumpkin guts, so we've got 2 or so cups left over in the freezer for other baking projects. In the end, it felt really good to have used basically the entire pumpkin and have bread made completely from scratch. Delicious!