A pumpkin round-up: savory and sweet

Before November is over, let's talk about pumpkin for a little bit because YES PLEASE.

1. Pumpkin chili

This chili is decidedly savory and (big surprise) I love it. It is vegetarian as written but I think it'd go great with meat, which is how I'm going to make it today. Kayla - who brought us the tomato paste freezing tip in a previous post - blends the canned tomatoes before adding them, which definitely takes it to the next level.

I highly recommend doubling the recipe and making jalepeno cheese cornbread muffins to go alongside!

2a. Roasted kabocha salad

Trying out another recipe from Vegetarian that I have had bookmarked (literally, ha) for a while. I always steal the kabocha from the tempura pile; it's absolutely my favorite pumpkin (so starchy!).

2b. Oh wait, this is my favorite pumpkin:

Sweet, savory, and tangy.

4. Pumpkin bread

Kathy loves to reminisce about the pumpkin bread I made six years ago when Kenny helped me cut and roast sugar pumpkins and we made the bread from homemade puree.

(It also didn't hurt that I put chocolate chips in the batter.)

We love using this Orangette recipe, but we cut the sugar in half so we can enjoy putting the (optional?!) chocolate in it. I've written it as a doubled recipe (so you can use up a can of pumpkin, or if not you can make the pumpkin chili, see point number 1 above) so you can do one loaf plain (which a lot of our family loves) and the other with chocolate and/or walnuts. We decided we like chocolate best, no walnuts.

Pumpkin Bread with Chocolate Chips
adapted from Orangette

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 t baking soda
1/2 t baking powder
1 1/2 t salt
1 T cinnamon
1 t ginger
1 t nutmeg
1/2 t cloves

2/3 c water
1 t vanilla

12 T unsalted butter, at room temp
1 1/4 c sugar {this is halved from Orangette's recipe}

4 large eggs, room temp
2 cup pumpkin puree (if making homemade puree that is thinner in texture than canned pumpkin, you can reduce the water above)

1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9x5 loaf pans.

Whisk dry ingredients together.

Beat butter until creamy, about 30 seconds, then add sugar and blend until lightened in color, abut 3 minutes. Beat in eggs one at a time.

Add pumpkin puree, and beat on low speed until just blended.

Add flour mixture in three parts, alternating with the water-vanilla mixture in two parts, beating on low until smooth and just combined.

Fold in chocolate and pour into pans.

Bake for about an hour, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan on a rack for five or ten minutes before unmolding to cool completely on the rack.

Friendsgiving 2016

I gotta put together a slap-bang post before Thanksgiving because sometimes done is better than perfect.

Although, perfect is: this beautiful sign that Kayla made for our Friendsgiving last Sunday with all the young families from church.

Less than perfect is: the quality of my pictures. I really need to clean off my phone from grubby hands. (You think I'm talking about my children, but I'm not.) (Although! Emilyn has been doing the cutest thing which is to put her play phone to her ear whenever we say, "Hello?")

The party was a huge success and I wanted to share some of aspects I thought made it so.

It was a potluck, and the Evite "What To Bring" section enabled us to guide people towards covering all the necessary components to a complete spread. 

I divvied food up into smaller "bites," if you will, so that people could pick and choose a couple things together if that was easier than tackling a big item. 

Asking someone to bring cider and a bag of ice guaranteed that our drinks would be cold, even if they wouldn't be refrigerated during church. I also separately requested a 1/2 lb decaf beans to be brought.

I'm learning to delegate, because even when it's a potluck, there can end up being a lot of last minute purchases that add expenses for the host. This way you have margin to splurge on other fun (or necessary) ideas that come up later.

David and I provided the turkey, and since this was a casual gathering, I felt the freedom to not have to present a beautiful (some have called it "stunt") turkey at the table. This would have been really challenging anyway, seeing as the function immediately followed service on Sunday.

So, we roasted the turkey on Friday (since David was off then but had to work on Saturday). I have never before made a turkey in such a relaxed ("not agitated" to be Earnest) manner. It was marvelous.

At 4 o'clock on a relaxed afternoon without any company expected, we got to eat the crispy skin off (ha) and then when it cooled, we sliced and refrigerated the meat to be warmed up in gluten-free (i.e., just corn starch, no flour) gravy in a crock pot on Sunday morning. Crock pot FTW again.

Pro-tip: multi-purposing cups as name cards.

The only other elements of "structure" (I really had to restrain myself here) were a Mad Lib and a brief sharing of everyone's highlight of the year and a challenge of the year.

decorations? activity? "agenda"?

There were four babies in the group that had been born within the last year so the majority of the answers to highlights and challenges was babies. (We laughed when we discovered repeatedly that so many people's "favorite activity" on the Mad Lib was sleeping.)

Kayla was an awesome co-host and I personally had a blast doing this with her. When everyone left (which was late, another good sign), I noticed that I felt so filled up, both literally and figuratively.

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. If you need more, check out our 2014 Thanksgiving or revisit the letter I wrote mysef aboout hosting parties.

If I posted on Instagram:

This dill-icious cauliflower salad first made for me by my friend Emily.

We are having two Thanksgivings this year but at neither one will there be classic trashy green bean casserole, so I made one the other day for just David and me.

Getting in two or three laps around our block at 5 a.m. for almost two weeks = surpassing my 10,000 steps.

After an appointment with a naturopath who strongly recommended an elimination diet for my eczema, I desperately needed some Costco pizza and a hot dog.

 

I didn't do the lemon, but the banana and prayer worked. Always good to know someone raised by avocado farmers. ;)

Falling for wintery foods

(First of all, what?! Okay, that said...

...) I'm often disappointed with traditional beef stews, finding them too acidic or even tinny tasting, and not beefy enough to boot.

But there is one version that never fails, and that is Ree Drummond's Sunday Night Stew.

Her pictures are way more gorgeous, her sauce more deeply mahogany, probably because I use chicken stock where she uses beef.

My favorite part of this recipe is the turnips - different, but oh so good, a wonderful contrast texturally to the beef.

It also doesn't hurt that Ree serves the stew on top of mashed potatoes that have been whipped with a stick of butter and a carton of cream cheese.

I highly recommend that you allow your rule-following (at least when it comes to recipes) spouse to make the mashed potatoes so that he can use the full amount of fat and you don't have to see how much goes into it to make it so luscious and heavenly.

(And this is why we all willingly fork over our hard-earned paychecks to cafes and bakeries, so we don't have to see all the good bad stuff that goes into everything that tastes amazing.)

Bonus: Pro tip from my friend Kayla is to freeze spoonfuls of tomato paste (because you NEVER need a whole can and it ALWAYS goes to waste) on a sheet pan, par-freeze it, then transfer to a ziplock in the freezer so you always have little dollops of paste when needed. You're welcome.

---

Another meal we tried this week was Winter Albondigas Soup:

And finally...

• Reading 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam. It's surprisingly provocative for me personally, enough so that I might need to do a book report (aka another post) on this. As a teaser, know that I have woken up at 5 a.m. (!) for the last two days and gone walking! (I took advantage of Daylights Savings Time to make this shift.)
• Enjoyed this post on 7 Steps to Internet Sanity
• Appreciated this follow-up article from Stephie to my question about cookbook club.
• Love this quote by Cyril Connolly: "Better to write for yourself and have no public than write for the public and have no self."

Get ready for a bunch of randoms.

Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes is seriously the bomb. No deep frying, no sub-recipes (i.e., recipes whose ingredient lists are themselves things you need to prepare). Irreverent, bold, nerdy, lazy, pan-Asian. Basically everything I am. I was already sold, and then it came out and used the word "subparenthetically" in the middle of a parenthetical! What the what?! I need.

David and I both finished Scary Close and loved it. (Eunice, I'm sorry I'm so late to the e-book game. For the life of me I could not figure it out two years ago when you gave me a free copy!)

I have also been bawling my eyes out over Lost and Found, the episode on the Liturgists where Science Mike and Michael Gungor tell their stories of their losing their faith. (It's taken me a week and I'm still in part 1 because of all the crying breaks.) This was the first time I've heard the term "deconversion." I resonated with almost everything they are talking about, and it's so validating to have intelligent people articulate some very complex and nuanced and vulnerable things. I also chortled when they talked about Donald Miller and Rob Bell being "dangerous" authors to a Southern Baptist.

Speaking of Bell, listening to Velvet Elvis and enjoying it so far. (The audiobook is actually read by the author, who is, in this case, a great reader. But David listened to Scary Close and the reader - not Don Miller - was not a good match for the book. Alas.)

Annoyed by The Couple Next Door. Shame on me, but I skipped the middle section and read the end. I never do that kind of thing. Oh well.

Also enjoyed The Power of Habit and the perhaps controversial Love Warrior.

Absolutely slayed by my Enneathought a couple of days ago:

Today, explore the issue of boundaries. As a Six, are your boundaries too rigid? Can you trust people to get close to you? Can you share more of your feelings and ideas?

(Yes, Kayla, that was what inspired my notebook entry. ;p)

Invented this dish of steamed tilapia over silken tofu cubes with black bean sauce. We loved the layered textures. (It felt analogous to the Asian carb-on-carb-ness of potatoes and rice as well as reminiscent of Fuschia Dunlop's avocado over silken tofu appetizer.)

Had a super eggplant week with Persian-style eggplant dip and miso-crusted eggplant (both from Liana Krisoff's Vegetarian*), and then yu-xiang eggplant with grass-fed ground beef (amazing!). *Kind of trying to do a cook/book club with this. Slai, can you please give me more details on how you guys did yours?

Finally, gearing up for Thanksgiving season. What are some creative ways you guys are thinking of celebrating Thanksgiving this year?