Monday, November 29, 2010

Glorious Gourds

Squash!  Who cannot love squash?  Well I am the one to speak since I would never eat a pumpkin or a squash in the form of it roasting in the oven.  My favorite form of pumpkin would be in a pumpkin pie.  At any rate, referred by a friend to a store with free pumpkins, my first thought was that there were only a few and why bother go and pick up a pumpkin.  I not only found many, many, many glorious gourds, but they were of every size, color and shape.  I tried to get an assortment, but sadly not all were great for cooking.
Sunday morning...I decided I needed to tackle the pounds upon pounds of squash sitting, patiently waiting fro me to do something with them.  So I began the hours and hours of chopping, boiling and pureeing the lovely squash, and I came down to many cups of squash.  Lots of purred squash.  Now I am at the point that I need to discover more to make than just pumkpin bread.




So if you, dear reader, have any suggestions of what to do with pureed squash, I would be happy to try them out.  In the meantime, if you are on my Christmas list, think pumpkin bread....lots and lots of pumpkin bread. Until then sweet dreams of squash puree.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Eggs anyone?

What's for breakfast?  I don't know how many times people have asked me this.  Most people look into the cupboard and see cereal and think that is the only thing to eat.  This however is not true, especially if you have some flour, sugar and eggs.  You can create numerous easy, quick and delicious things with those ingredients.  Since breakfast is such an easy meal to prepare, I decide to try something different for breakfast yesterday.  I came across a recipe for a sausage and cheese egg bake.  It was of course easy to make as long as you prepared everything the night before as it required the ingredient to sit overnight in the refrigerator.

Of course this particular egg bake cannot be good for you....it has 3 -4 cups of cream in it, though I lightened it a little and added more milk and less cream.  Spicy sausage, bread, 2 cups of cheese, and 5 eggs later you have what is ready to soak overnight.  Then add one more cup of milk/cream and 2 more eggs and throw it in the over until it is golden brown and sizzling through and through.  It was served with pumpkin bread also fresh from the oven.  Oh, the wonders of breakfast!

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Remains of pumpkins

As I mentioned before I like to take something and use all the parts of it.  Recreation of a pumpkin turns into boiled mass of puree of pumpkin and then pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie!  Yum!
Pumkpin puree!  This one happens to be from two different squash since they both were living at my house and needed to be turned into some good to eat.

The first of many pumpkin pies for the season.  This is a simple recipe of pumpkin, sweetened condensed milk, eggs and spices.
And pumpkin bread...This is another very simple recipe with only flour, sugar, spices and eggs.  Simple, delicious and it makes two loaves so you can share this pumpkin goodness.  Pumpkin is the essence of autumn...it helps us celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving and the autumn in general with all the varieties of squash available for cooking and eating.  Happy Autumn!