Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

I recently found the King Arthur Flour website and its 45 pumpkin recipes just waiting to be tried. It also has several pumpkin box mixes and pumpkin extract. I ordered them all and will be testing them over the next few months. This recipe was easy, made lots of cookies and tasted great. Andrew, the Hub and I, along with neighbors Ann and Bernie, were the tasters and no one had anything but good stuff to say about the cookies. As with pretty much all pumpkin baked-good recipes though, they don't keep for very long because of the moisture in the pumpkin. We didn't mess with the glaze, which is mostly for decorating anyway.  

My Own Pumpkin Patch

A funny thing happened in my yard this year. I have small pumpkin plants growing everywhere. Every plant that got a dose of our homemade compost has rogue pumpkin plants growing from the base. Here's a hydrangea with pumpkins.

A rhododendron with pumpkins

A dogwood with pumpkins

Even my hanging basil and tomato has a pumpkin plant growing out the side. Too funny.

Since our backyard is too shady for pumpkins (or any other vegetable) to do well, we plant on the side yard. I had peas in the spring and then planted the package of cheese pumpkin seeds I bought at Monticello. I can't remember if they were heirloom seeds or not, but was really disappointed when the package only had eight seeds in it. Actually we couldn't have handled too many more as they have grown to about 20 feet and have taken over the entire side of the yard.

I have six long island cheese pumpkins so far that look like this.

Pumpkin Pizza Crust

I'm only calling this pumpkin pizza crust because I found the rest of the pizza a ton of work and not really very memorable. Although Andrew loved it. The uncooked sauce didn't taste right, so I let it simmer for a while. It helped but not enough for me to try it again. Commercially produced stuff tastes much better. The veggies, zucchini and tomatoes, and cheeses were just ok. We added turkey pepperoni, too. The basil-Parmesan vinaigrette was just wrong and so unnecessary. The crust though is really really good. I used regular flour because I didn't have any bread flour. It rose beautifully on the hood of my warm car in the garage. What a great way to get pumpkin into the most ordinary of food items - pizza crust. You couldn't taste the pumpkin. I doubt pumpkin haters would even know it was there.

Pumpkin Carrot Swirl Bars

These bars from meals.com are really good. Everyone at Discovery Creative liked them and they disappeared fast. Beth decided it was the best we'd tried yet. It contains enough baking powder and soda to make them light even though they contain a whole can of pumpkin and a cup of carrots. I wouldn't call them healthy, but they do contain a total of 2 3/4 cups vegetables to fairly reduced amounts of fats, sugar and eggs. The creator must have worked hard to get the calories down to only 70 per bar, yet still make the taste great.

Pumpkin Salsa

This recipe from howsweeteats.com actually calls for butternut squash, but this is not a butternut squash blog, so I changed it to pumpkin. Still using the frozen Mexican pumpkin, I was surprised at how well it kept its shape and stayed moderately firm. The recipe calls for cooking then chopping, but I have found that the other way around works better. It also calls for pomegranate seeds, which aren't available this time of year, so I had to leave them out. This isn't a Mexican salsa, it has rice wine vinegar and honey in the dressing. Everyone liked this, but decided it was too good to waste on chips and thought it would go well with fish or chicken.

We also felt it could have more of a kick, even though I did add some jalapeno. Perhaps the missing pomegranate seeds added it. Next time I'm thinking either more vinegar or perhaps some lime juice.

My faithful Discovery Creative tasters.

Chilean-style Sopaipillas - Pumpkin Fritters

When the Hub and I were first married, we lived in Wichita Falls, Texas. We absolutely loved a Mexican restaurant in the downtown area whose name I've forgotten. I can't remember what we ate for main dishes, but we really only went there (at least twice a week) for the sopaipillas they served for dessert. They were little pillows of deep fried dough that you bit a corner off and then filled with honey. I can still taste them and I'm sure the Hub can too because he has looked for a similar dish ever since. And the sad part is, we've never found any that were even close.  

It is for this reason, I couldn't wait to make these. Here's what the article says about them: "Chilean-style sopaipillas are delicious fried rounds of pumpkin-spiced dough drenched in a brown sugar syrup. They make a delicious fall breakfast or afternoon snack with coffee. A cousin of Peruvian picarones, sopaipillas are traditionally eaten on rainy winter days in Chile.

While these are not the same as the ones I remember, they are still pretty darn good. So good in fact that the Hub and I decided to skip dinner and just eat these one Saturday night. After frying, you dip them in the syrup and then serve the syrup on the side for more dipping. Brown sugar syrup doesn't begin to describe this delicious syrup with hints of spices and orange. They were just as good the next morning heated up in the microwave.

Savory Pumpkin & Sage Gougeres

I had nothing but trouble with these little things. Called cheese puffs and other similar names, what gougeres are is basically a savory cream puff. My problems started with the words "don't let the water and butter come to a boil." I've made a lot of cream puffs, and you always have the water come to a boil and not just a plain boil, a rolling boil. It's the temperature you need to get the flour to clump. My batter was so runny, I had to put it in mini muffin tins to even cook it. While it was cooking, I check the cookbook Around my French Table by Dorie Greenspan in which she has a recipe for gougeres. Yep - hard boiling water. So my gougeres actually turned out to be tiny quiches - they didn't puff much either. But on the good side, they have a fabulous taste, as puffs or quiches. I'm going to try them again with boiling water because I think I would like them even more as actual gougeres.

This is what they were supposed to look like from the webpage Cookin' Canuck.