Fall cooking has arrived in our kitchen. It started last week with baked butternut squash and risotto. Then when our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farmer brought us a pumpkin, it meant fall had officially arrived.
We didn’t waste much time getting it into the oven, in simple farmer fashion. I love when Megan Allen, our farmer from the Care of the Earth CSA, tells me the simple secrets to cooking. I did just what she said.
In her words, here’s how it’s done. To cook: remove seeds and chop into several large pieces; bake at 425 for about 1 hr and 15 minutes; let cool and then remove flesh; puree to use in any favorite recipes (bread, cheesecake, muffins, ravioli, stuffed shells,lasagna).Farmers make everything seem like it is just second nature. And if she makes it sound simple, it makes me feel like I can do it.
The pumpkin baking, from the puree to the roasted pumpkin seeds that my toddler couldn’t get enough of, most definitely says fall has arrived.
With our pumpkin puree we baked a loaf of pumpkin banana bread from this recipe on all recipes.com. I use this site a lot because the recipes always work, are a simple one step process and use basic enough ingredients that I always have in my kitchen. On the other hand, these recipes use a lot of sugar, vegetable oil and white flour. So I usually cut the sugar amounts by half, substitute whole-wheat flour and use olive oil instead of vegetable oil. If it’s a heavy bread or cookies, it helps to still use a quarter portion of white flour of what the recipe calls for. Adding a teaspoon of yeast help in the rising process too.
For the pumpkin seeds, I drizzled them in melted butter, shock some salt on them and baked them on 300 degrees for 45 minutes.
Next up with the rest of our puree will be these chocolate chip pumpkin cookies from Sweet Greens. I made them last year for my baby’s first birthday, and they will forever be an annual celebration of fall in our kitchen. They were that good.
After that, I’ll be putting my immersion blender to work with fall soups – potatoes, carrots, oh my.
Yes I L-O-V-E cooking in the fall. I love doing it to celebrate my two fall babies who were born in October. And I love doing it with the kitchen door open, inviting the fall breezes inside. Outside my kitchen windows the leaves are changing, making the sidewalk glow yellow from the ginkgo trees above. Yes I love fall, in so many ways.
