Brittany's Pantry
I know pumpkin has been on the radar for a month or so, but with Thanksgiving right around the corner, it seems that now, more than ever, it has the potential to be a star at your table. Yes, I am talking about pumpkin pie and soon I will share with you my favorite recipe for it but for now, I wanted to give you a quick How To on baking your own pumpkins. Making mashed pumpkin for baking is extremely easy and inexpensive. If you have never tried it, welcome to your tutorial! Doesn’t that bowl look awesome?! I love the color of pumpkin!
Just to be clear, let me reiterate that using canned pumpkin for any recipe at any time is just fine. I do it myself, especially during the off months when I can’t get a fresh pumpkin and I want to make muffins or pancakes or something. If you are reading this and thinking to yourself, “Yeah right. I will never do this. Bring on the canned stuff!” that is totally OK. But if you ever really wanted to make something totally from scratch and you kept seeing these pumpkins at the farmer’s market/grocery/pumpkin patch and wondered how hard it would be to do, let me put your mind at ease. It is ridiculously easy. Check it out!
So this is a sugar pumpkin. Or pie pumpkin or baking pumpkin. It depends on how they are labeled where you pick it up but they are usually a little darker in color than your regular carving pumpkin a bit smaller than a volleyball. These pumpkins are less stringy and the flesh has a sweeter flavor and smoother texture than your average garden pumpkin. They are also much easier to manage than an enormous Jack-O-Lantern size pumpkin!
I have two here and they have just been washed off. Please please please rinse of your pumpkins, watermelons, cantaloupes, honey dew, etc before you cut them up and eat them! No, you don’t eat the outside, but that is the part that is now sitting on your clean counter and you have no idea who has handled it, where it has rolled around, what it was exposed to, or how far it has traveled! I don’t want that unknown grime on my cutting board. Eew Eew Eew.
Cut them in half from top to bottom. Over the years I have discovered this seems to be the easiest way to get the seeds out and scoop out the flesh. Use a large sharp knife and be very careful! Some varieties of pumpkins have a thicker shell or rind on them than others so this may be easy to do and it might be tough. I usually have my husband cut them in half for me because his hands are bigger, he has better upper body strength to keep the knife steady, and also so I can give him smooches of thanks when he is done. Ahem.
Anyway, scoop out the guts and save the seeds! This is your opportunity to make Roasted Pumpkin Seeds, an extremely healthy snack! Don’t let the opportunity pass you by to try these if you have never done it! It always makes me feel all resourceful and stuff.
Scrape the stingy membrane away with a spoon until the inside is smooth and clean.
Finish cleaning all your pumpkin halves and then place them on a sheet pan lined with foil.
Place them cut side down. I have discovered that they steam nicely this way instead of actually roasting. This is perfect since you want the flesh to be nice and smooth, not browned or crispy on the edges. Bake the halves in the oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the flesh gives easily when pierced with a knife. Some pumpkins have a harder shell on them than others so you may need to turn a half over to see if it is nice and soft.
Scoop the flesh out of the shell and into a large bowl.
Isn’t that a beautiful big bowl of pumpkin? Mmmm. Smells good.
This is where people differ a bit. Some people put the pumpkin in a food processor and whiz till it is baby food. I prefer to just mash the heck out of it with a potato masher. If you have cooked your pumpkin until it is good and soft, it will smooth out just fine. See?
Nice and smooth. Now just cool it to room temperature and chill in a covered container in the fridge. If your pumpkin collects a bit of moisture around the edges, just pour it off. I like to do this while it cools in a bowl on the counter. You don’t want it to be soupy so I don’t like to stir in any of the excess water that surfaces. But it really doesn’t matter. Unless your puree is really watery, it should be just fine as is. Measure it out just like you would the stuff from the store in a can! Mashed pumpkin will last at least a week in the fridge but feel free to freeze any you don’t use. It is super easy to just thaw it out and bake with it at a later date.
Lovely. Now you can make Pumpkin Pie Muffins or Marshmallow Pumpkin Dip. You could also make Sweet Potato Biscuits, but replace the potato with mashed pumpkin. Scrumptious!
Stay tuned for more recipe ideas to use up your pumpkin puree!
Well, it is my own personal rule so I guess I can break it if I want to, right?
I am referring to my rule about not posting two dessert recipes in a row. I like variety when I am in the kitchen and since baking and sweets only accounts for 50% of what I make, it would not be very representative of my…well…pantry 😉 if sugar and breads were all I posted about. I love to cook as much as I love to bake and since we eat three meals a day that have nothing to do with dessert, real meals are more useful to us all. This post obviously breaks that rule but I have a good excuse! I had planned on posting a new recipe that I have been working on for beef teriyaki with peppers and noodles. Actually, I had planned on posting that recipe several days ago, but the dish needed some tweaking. Well, I messed with it again last night and unfortunately it was a major backwards step! So now I am super frustrated and I have no teriyaki recipe for you. To make up for it, I am posting this recipe for Chocolate Croissant Bread Pudding. And WOW! What a recipe it is!
Pictures don’t do this dish justice, so this is the only one I am going to post. But rest assured, it tastes spectacular. Unlike traditional bread puddings, this is made with croissants instead of bread, a stroke of genius that I wish I had thought of. I don’t feel too bad about this though as the recipe is from one of this countries premiere pastry chefs, Gale Gand. True to form, this recipe is simple with classic ingredients and minimal steps. You can make it the night before and bake it the next day, making it a great choice for all the holiday company that may be in your near future. I have actually been wanting to make this dessert for literally, the last ten years. When I passed the bakery section at my local grocery store this week, they had a huge package of croissants on the leftover stale bread shelf. Perfect. There were so many, I froze half of them to make bread pudding in the future. Like, next week.
Quick Disclaimer: Due to the holiday season that is now upon us, I can pretty much guarantee that I will be breaking my ‘rule’ many times in the near future. You don’t mind do you?
Chocolate Croissant Bread Pudding
If possible, use croissants that are a day or two old. Dry bread will absorb even more of the custard. Yum!
5 croissants, the regular size, not the mini ones, cut into one inch cubes
3 c cream
1 c milk
4 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
pinch of salt
6 eggs
1 c sugar
Put the cubed bread into a medium sized baking dish and set it aside. In a large sauce pan, heat the cream and milk until it is hot and just starts to steam. Do NOT let it boil! Remove it from the heat and add the chocolate, whisking until it its melted and the mixture is smooth. While that cools slightly, whisk the eggs and sugar and salt together in a separate bowl until smooth. While continuing to whisk, slowly pour the hot milk and chocolate mixture into the eggs, being sure to keep whisking to keep the eggs from cooking. When it is all combined, slowly pour over the bread. Carefully press the bread cubes down to make sure that it is all submerged and soaking up the chocolate custard. Let sit for about 15 minutes to let it continue to soak, gently moving the mixture if needed to make sure everything is even. *Can be made up to this point one day ahead. Just cover and chill.
Bake in a water bath (see below) at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes, or until the center is set and cooked. Remove from water bath and cool a bit before serving. This is wonderful slightly warm with a scoop of ice cream. Also wonderful for breakfast!
Note: A water bath is simply when a delicate dish (usually a custard containing eggs) needs to be cooked evenly and gently. The cooking vessel, in this case a casserole or baking dish, is placed in a larger dish or baking pan and hot water is poured around it until it reaches halfway up the sides of the dish. This distributes heat more evenly around the food, allowing it to cook gently. All I did for this recipe was take a large 9X13 ceramic dish that my baking dish fit easily in the bottom of. I do recommend, from experience, that you place the baking dish in the bigger dish, put the whole thing in the oven and then carefully pour in the hot water, filling it up till it comes halfway up the side of the dish. Carrying two dishes, one filled with food sitting in a pan filled with water and trying to get it all in the oven just invites disaster. Just BE CAREFUL! The water is hot and dishes are heavy! It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t! Good luck!
Ultimate Peanut Butter Cookies
Brittany wrote this on 29 October 2011
peanut butter, peanuts
Mmmm. Peanut butter cookies. Just saying the name makes me happy. I really love peanut butter so the cookie version is just another way of feeding my addiction. Although ultimately I am a purest and crunchy peanut butter on thick slices of homemade wheat bread with honey is nothing sort of stellar.
Speaking of peanut butter, when I lived in San Diego there was an open market that I would go to down by the beach. I don’t know if you could call it a farmer’s market exactly, as the vendors sold a lot of prepared foods, fresh caught fish, watermelon lemonade, jewelry and the like, but there were several stands that had plenty of fresh fruit. Local fruit and fresh caught fish and seafood is definitely one of the things I miss most about living on the ocean. So anyway, there was this man that would sell homemade peanut, cashew, and almond butters. I think he actually owned a health food kind of cafe and this was just something he did to promote is own products, but whatever brought him there, I was grateful! He didn’t just have plain nut butters. Instead he had every conceivable combination you could think of! Honey peanut butter, honey cinnamon peanut butter, super extra crunchy peanut butter (you almost had to eat that one with a fork), dark chocolate chunk cashew butter, white chocolate chunky almond butter, carmel chocolate peanut swirl butter…way more than I could ever list. He had big open jars of everything and you could taste as many as you wanted over and over. It was peanut butter heaven! Not only was it the perfect late night snack, right out of the jar with a spoon, but it brought me back to my childhood peanut butter days. Fresh nut butters have a different texture and flavor than those commercially made and not everyone likes the difference. But as a kid, my Mom would get fresh peanut butter at the local co-op in huge half-gallon tubs. Don’t forget, I have five siblings so we went through a ton of peanut butter. The natural oils in it would rise to the top and we would have to stir it every time we got a spoonful. College and the introduction to JIF by my roommates temporarily changed my tastes, but that market brought it all back. Although my local grocery store here doesn’t carry it, most major chains have started to offer natural peanut butters, usually found in the refrigerated section due to the lack of preservatives used. If you have never tried it, give natural peanut butter a go. You just may be converted.
But back to cookies, this recipe is my new basic peanut butter cookie recipe. I got rid of all my others after having made this a few times. I added Reeses Pieces to give them a Halloween kind of look, but normally, I would leave them out. There is no need to make the criss cross fork marks in these, but if you want to stick to tradition and need them on your peanut butter cookies, by all means go for it.
One Year Ago: Sweet Potato Biscuits
Ultimate Peanut Butter Cookies
Adapted from America’s Test Kitchen
1 c (2 sticks) softened butter
1 c brown sugar
1 c sugar
2 eggs
1 c peanut butter, crunchy or creamy, but not natural
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 c flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 c chopped peanuts
1 c Reeses Pieces, optional
Cream butter and sugars in the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the eggs, vanilla, and peanut butter and mix until all combined. Add dry ingredients slowly and mix. Fold in peanuts and candy. Drop by rounded Tablespoonful onto a greased or parchment lined sheet pan. Cross hatch with a fork if desired. Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes on the pan to set up then remove to a wire rack. Freezes well.
Love a Good Recipe?
Then you’ve come to the right place! I’m Brittany, and I share tested, trusted recipes you’ll love. I prepare & photograph food, obsess over the perfect recipe, and enjoy grins of delight when I serve up something awesome. Enjoy!
