Suzie's Sweets

After I made the pumpkin muffins the other week I had a lot of leftover pumpkin that I wanted to use. I found an interesting recipe for pumpkin maple baked bean cornbread casserole (oh my!) and decided to try it. The recipe warns that the cornbread topping is great for the casserole but not really great as a stand-alone cornbread recipe. The cornbread didn’t rise at all, and even though I halved the recipe next time I wouldn’t halve the topping part.

Beans, pumpkin, onion and craisins cooking down

Casserole before being baked

The casserole turned out well. It’s an interesting mix of hearty and sweet. I’m not a huge fan of onions, at least obvious onions (like getting a big moutful of onion), so next time I would use less onion and chop them smaller than the recipe called for (I wouldn’t leave them out entirely because the onion flavour complimented the pumpkin and cornbread well and added a nice balance to the sweetness of the craisins and maple syrup). Overall I would make this recipe again. I love cornbread, I love beans, and I love casseroles. Win!

Susan

Squash, I’ma get to you in a minute but…

My parents have a giant garden. They moved to the country last year and now have 2 acres of land, and went a little batshit with planting this spring. As a result, they grew about 5 times what they can eat and freeze for the winter. My parents have gotten really creative in using up the food they can’t consume. They freeze and can as much as possible (my mom has been making new, and sometimes weird, dishes) but they give a lot away to neighbours as well as the local foodbank.

To give you an example of how much food they’ve grown, this year they grew about 50 squash. The larger squash they’ve grown, some weighing up to 70 lbs. (srsly.), present a bigger challenge in using since they are too big to donate, too unweildly to process to cook up, and probably wouldn’t taste very good either. In an attempt to get rid of some of the big ones they gave one to the cattle farmer down the road, because apparently cows really like pumpkins, and this was big like a pumpkin so the cows wouldn’t know the difference right? The farmer never called them for a second squash.

But back to my dinner.

My parents’ over active garden means that whenever I visit them they drive me back to Toronto just so that I can bring a ton of vegetables back for my friends an myself.

Thus, when I graduated last week my parents used their trip to Toronto to see me cross the stage as an excuse to offload some squash and beets. I gave one of the squash to a friend, who made the most fantastic soup (I made some cornbread to eat with it). I used a second squash, a delicata that a neighbour traded for one of my parents’ squash (everybody is trying to get rid of squash!), to make stuffed squash.

I used this recipe, but added a bit of bacon and used regular milk instead of almond milk.

The end result: I ate half of a squash for dinner, and the other half for lunch the next day. It destroyed my runger.

It also satisfied my need for Fall-like meals.

And apparently you can roast squash seeds like pumpkin seeds:

Susan

Pumpkin

Fall! Decorative gourd season! Cheap pumpkins! I let the excitement get to me and bought a beautiful pie pumpkin, only to get it home and realise that I don’t have any knives sharp enough to cut it up to cook with. The pumpkin is now festively sitting on my diningroom table with two other mini plumkings and my adorable saltshakers (c/o  the LRMC media lead).

Pumpkin et s’amis, les cochons du sel et du poivre, et les petite citrouilles, aka plumkings

Since I was still feeling the Fall baking-bug, sans knife, I bought a can of pumpkin to bake with. I used this pumpkin muffin recipe, but added about a cup of raisins and craisins.

Baking materials

Batter

Muffins all cooked!

The muffins were delish, but made 24 instead of the 12 in the instructions. I guess my idea of a muffin isn’t a head-sized portion of cakiness. I froze half of them so that I can enjoy a taste of fall all winter. Or at least for a week or so after the fresh ones are gone.

Susan

PS I still had pumpkin left from the can, so I made a casserole out of it. Post/pictures to come.