Winter Luxury Pumpkins - Part One

Get ready, this is going to be a long post - three meals that were very different, but connected by pumpkins. I love to string meals together like this, using one to prep for the next. It's an art all it's own!


Some farmer friends of mine, Jacques and Amy Neukom, recently gave me six Winter Luxury Pumpkins. These are similar to the regular Sugar Pie Pumpkins used to make pumpkin pie, but a little older and more obscure variety that's been around since at least the 1880s. A few references I found online suggest that these are very similar to the pumpkins grown by Native Americans and eaten at the first Thanksgiving, which is plausible, since all squash comes from the Americas and a variety that's been around for that long must have some ties to native cultures....

Anyway, the seed is hard to buy in large quantities, and the farmers who gave them to me would like to grow a lot of them, so they're saving as many seeds as possible this year. They gave me the pumpkins to use, with the condition that I scoop out the seeds, dry them, and return them for next year's planting. I was only too glad to use these pumpkins as for an autumn pumpkin challenge! How many ways are there to cook a pumpkin, and is it possible to get sick of them? I don't think so - they're really good - very smooth and creamy with an almost carmel-y sweet taste.

I cut open the first two pumpkins two weekends ago. Here are the seeds scooped out on a paper towel. I let them dry like this overnight, and then put them in a paper bag and delivered them to Jacques and Amy.


I rubbed the underside of the pumpkin halves with butter and baked them till they were tender. The skins have a really neat netting - almost like a cantaloupe.


It didn't take long at all to cook, just about a half hour. I scooped the cooked flesh out into the food processor. It looks a little stringy but when I processed it, it quickly got very smooth....


I wanted to add some fresh ginger to the pie I was planning, so instead of chopping it separately I added it to the pumpkin in the food processor. It make a wonderful silky smooth, spicy sweet pumpkin puree.


I decided to start out my pumpkin experiments with a traditional pumpkin pie. I used this recipe from Epicurious for Spiced Pumpkin Pie. I like it extra spicy, so I added more cinnamon, cloves, and of course ginger than the recipe called for. I also used all brown sugar instead of a mixture of white and brown. Here's the batter: eggs, cream, pumpkin, spices, brown sugar, and molasses. Mmmmm....


I had bought some of the local figs from Orleans at the Farmer's Market that morning, so I chopped some up and sprinkled them into the pie. It doesn't look like much in this picture, and unfortunately I didn't get any other pictures, but it was delicious! Sometimes things are just too good to take the time to photograph - I have to enjoy them right away! The figs cooked in perfectly and added interesting sweet chunks in the spicy smooth custard-y pie.

I had quite a bit of pureed pumpkin and ginger left over, which I put away in the fridge to use later on.


Fast forward a week. I baked this chicken on Saturday night last weekend - no there's no pumpkins involved, but it's all connected, just wait and see!


The chicken was organic, but unfortunately not local or pastured - I guess you can't have it all all the time! I've been on a Julia Child kick recently, so I prepared this chicken more or less how she instructs (minus the trussing, which I decided was just too much work.) I rinsed it inside and out with cold water, dried it, and rubbed it all over with butter. I stuffed it with some herbs (fresh thyme, sage, and lemongrass from the garden) and a clove of garlic, and in the oven it went. I cooked it at a relatively high temperature (425 degrees) for about 15 minutes to brown the outside, and then turned it down to 325 for the rest of the cooking, basting it with butter every so often. About an hour before it was done, I added some local fingerling potatoes and torpedo onions, and about 10 minutes before it was done threw in some sugar snap peas from the garden. It was great - the butter made it especially juicy and succulent!

The whole point of the chicken was that I wanted to make fresh stock for the soup I was planning for Sunday night's meal, to which we had invited two friends and their young daughter. We ate the breasts and thighs of the freshly roasted chicken, saved the rest of the meat for another meal, and I used the carcass to make stock.


This beautiful local celery also played prominently in the stock. It's from some of the nicest upcoming farmers in the area - Ben and Kelsie of Rainfrog Farm. It's not at all like store-bought celery - it's tougher, but it's got amazing strong celery flavor that blows away any celery you'll ever find in a store. This is real celery, not just crunchy water!


I simmered a few stalks of chopped celery with the chicken carcass, a few chopped carrots, and a little salt over very low heat for about 4 hours. It made the house smell awesome!


Here's the stock I ended up with - beautiful! I used some for the pumpkin soup I was planning and had two quarts left over. I put this away in the fridge to use for my next pot of soup.

As the stock was cooking, I got to work on the other ingredients of the pumpkin soup. The recipe came from a wonderful book I just bought - Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan. It's included with the section about chestnuts, and uses all native and traditional seasonal foods.


I bought these chestnuts at the farmer's market on Saturday morning. I had never roasted chestnuts before, but it was pretty easy. First, I used a sharp knife to score the skin of each one - if you don't do this they're liable to explode while they're cooking!


I roasted them for about 10 minutes until the shells started to peel back. I actually think I could have roasted them a little longer - the inner skin, which is thinner and more fibrous that the outer shiny skin, didn't detach all the way - making it pretty difficult to shell them. I got through it though.


Here's the beginning of the soup - more of the celery, local carrots, and the last of my local Walla Walla onions. I sauteed these in butter till they were soft, then added the pumpkin and ginger puree that I'd been saving from the week before, and the chestnuts, and then some chicken broth....


This all cooked down for about an hour, and then I added a little local apple cider from Fortuna and pureed it all with my handy dandy hand blender. The last step was to add some cream and season it with salt and pepper.


As the soup was cooking, I made the cake that I was planning as a dessert for this meal. I had picked up a large bag of juice carrots at the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning. We made juice Saturday afternoon, which left us with a big pile of carrot pulp. I decided to use it to make a carrot cake. I really should have soaked the pulp in something to give it some of it's moisture back, but I didn't think of that till it was too late. I followed the carrot cake recipe I always use from the New Moosewood Cookbook, but it turned out much dryer and denser than usual. Not inedible, but noticeably dry.


I tried to make up for it with this fig icing. I started out with some leftover fig jam from my oatcake and fig jam extravaganza, and added more figs that I had bought on Saturday (I have to keep eating these amazing figs as long as they're around!), honey, cinnamon, and whiskey. Why whiskey? I don't know - we had some and it sounded good...


I had a tiny bit of confectioners sugar that had been kicking around the pantry for a while so I threw that in along with some leftover home made sour cream. It all cooked for a while, and then went in the fridge to chill.


And here I am assembling the cake...


Meanwhile, I made bread to accompany the soup. I used one of my favorite bread recipes - Oatmeal Rye Bread from The Tasajara Bread Book. Instead of regular rolled oats I used the local oats from Shakefork Farm, blended up just like in the oat cakes I made a few weeks ago. I ended up not having quite enough flour to properly kneed the dough, so the bread turned out a little dense, but it was still delicious. The oats gave it a wonderful chewy rich texture and nutty flavor.


Our friends arrived for dinner, and put out the appetizer - crackers with fresh figs, local goat cheese, and some yummy locally made olive and walnut tapanade (with a little local arugula for garnish.)


Our guests were our friends Erin and Chad, and their daugher Acacia. This is the same cutie who I posted eating her first peach back in July. Here she is four months later sampling her first fig - my how she's grown!


I think she liked it! She hasn't had any sugar yet, so this is about the sweetest thing she's ever tasted!


After we had demolished the appetizer, I set the table for dinner. It was a simple meal - a nice green salad that Erin brought, oatmeal rye bread, and soup. It's amazing how such a simple seeming meal can be so much work!


Here's the sliced bread. I really thought it was going to be terrible since I had ran out of flour and wasn't able to kneed it, but I was really happy with it. It had a great chewy texture, and went really well with some of my home-made butter and the soup.


This is the kind of soup that no picture can really do justice to, although I think we could have tried a little harder to make it more attractive. It was probably one of the better soups I've ever made - the ginger, chestnuts, and pumpkin was just about perfect combined with the vegetables and the fresh broth. I especially thought the apple cider added a nice element. You couldn't really identify apple cider in the flavor, but it definately added a wonderful richness. I pureed it pretty smooth, but there were just enough small chunks to make it interesting.


And then it was time for cake - dry, yes, but still delicious. The frosting was especially tasty. Plus I learned a good lesson - don't assume you can substitute de-juiced carrot pulp for fresh carrots in a recipe....I should have known that already though!


Our guests went home full, happy, and sleepy - just the way it should be! Only four more pumpkins to go!
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Culturing Dairy and Local Oat Cakes

I created this supremely local treat last weekend - Scottish oat cakes (made with local oats, and homemade butter and buttermilk,) topped with homemade cream cheese and fig jam. It was a long and involved process - especially all the dairy culturing - but worth it! This is based on a recipe from my childhood, and it even surpassed all my good memories!


Step one was to make the cream cheese, which is actually not true cream cheese, but a spreadable tangy cheese made from strained yogurt. I used homemade yogurt had been sitting in the fridge for over a week and needed to be used up. I poured the yogurt in a small colander lined with several layers of cheese cloth over top a Tupperware bowl.


I tied the cheese cloth over the yogurt with a rubber band and weighted it with this bag of beautiful local beans that I picked up at the farmer's market on Saturday. It's a mix of about 6 different bean varieties - almost too pretty to cook!


After about 10 hours, the yogurt had reduced to about half it's original volume.


It's hard to see in this picture, but the bowl underneath the yogurt had about 3 cups of a clear liquid (whey) that had strained off. Whey cool!


And here's the finished cheese. It's thick and creamy - about the consistency of cream cheese - relatively low fat, very high in protein - and it's delicious!


My next task was to make butter to use in the oat cakes. I've been making my own butter pretty consistently for a few months now - it's so good, and easy to make! Nobody makes butter in this county from Humboldt County cream, so it's also the only way to get truly local butter. If you haven't been converted to the wonders of butter, follow this link to the Weston A Price Foundation website. The cream is from Humboldt Creamery, which is mostly pasture raised - even better! The above picture is step one: heating the cream to about 180 degrees to sterilize it.


I cooled the cream to about 110 degrees and added the starter culture: a few tablespoons of this organic cultured sour cream. I would have used my own yogurt, but it had been sitting for over a week and I wasn't sure that the bacteria were still strong enough to make a good culture.


I poured the cream into two jars. The cream in the quart jar was for butter. The pint jar was for sour cream.


I wrapped the warm jars in dish towels and let them sit overnight in this cooler - can you find the cat in the picture?


The next day, it was thick and tangy - perfect!


I put the pint jar in the fridge to eat as sour cream, and dumped the cream from the quart jar into the food processor.


After about 4 minutes of processing, the butter separated from the buttermilk.


I poured off the buttermilk. It's tangy - great for baking or making salad dressing. I had enough to do both!


I poured some cold water into the processor, processed it with the butter, and strained if off. This cleans any remaining buttermilk from the butter. I had to do it 6 times until the water that drained off was totally clear. If there's any buttermilk left, it will go rancid and ruin the butter. It's also important that it be cold water, since warm water will melt the butter.


I strained the last of the water out of the butter by pressing it into this sieve.


I bought this nifty French butter dish at a local fair recently. The bottom half has about 2 inches of salt water in it, and the top half gets packed with butter.


It stores really well like this on the counter. The water makes an airtight seal around the butter and keeps it nice and fresh. We've learned not to keep it too close to the stove since the butter gets too warm and soft and slips down into the water.


The next step was to make the oat cakes. These are local, unrolled oats from Shakefork Farm in Arcata. These oats were the inspiration for this entire process - they're fresh and delicious, and I wanted to try them in this recipe.


Here are the oats after being processed for about 5 or 6 minutes - pretty fine, but not as fine as flour. Here's the full recipe:

• 3 cups oats, blended
• 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/3 scalded milk or cream (or buttermilk)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix oatmeal, flour, sugar, and salt. Cut in butter with hands. Dissolve soda in hot milk, add to dry mixture. Roll to 1/3 - 1/4 inches. Cut into round shapes using the top of a glass. Bake on a greased cookie sheet for 10 minutes.


Here's the dough. It's pretty crumbly, and seems too dry to roll out....


...but somehow it works. Here's the glass that I used to cut the cakes into rounds.


And here they are coming out of the oven. These are really good - a little chewy, and deliciously oaty!


Finally, it was time to make the fig jam. I got these super-ripe and delicious Black Mission figs at the farmer's market on Saturday. These have an extremely limited season. They're also pretty pricey, but worth every penny - they're one of the produce items I look forward to the most all year!


Here they are cut up. You can see how deliciously ooey-gooey they are!


I cooked them with local honey, orange peel, and cinnamon.


After about 30 minutes, the jam was thick, sweet and beautiful to behold.

It made a little over a pint of pure goodness!

Finally, late Sunday afternoon, everything was ready! It was almost dinner time, so I just made one to taste.

Later, we indulged ourselves in a delicious, almost completely local dessert. Mmmmmm! The jam has an almost jewel like quality. It's sweetness is perfectly complemented by the tangy cheese, and chewy, not too sweet oat cakes. It was a lot of work, but I've had plain oat cakes with tea for breakfast every morning this week, and a delicious dessert every night!
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The Wedding

Last weekend was the much anticipated wedding of my older brother! I flew home to Wisconsin to help celebrate. My mom, my younger brother and I were responsible for the rehearsal dinner the night before the ceremony, and we decided to do a local Wisconsin theme - sourcing as much as we could from South Central Wisconsin. We'd been planning for months, and it was fun to finally put it all together! The dinner was to be a picnic at a Madison city park, so a traditional Wisconsin bratwurst cookout seemed appropriate.

My mom started collecting the ingredients weeks before: In early September, she started fermenting cabbage to make sauerkraut, and called a local farm to order the bratwurst. She ordered hot dog buns from Jennifer Street Market, a favorite neighborhood grocery store/bakery. She collected three different flavors of locally made mustard, and about 4 different locally made pickles and pickle relish. The Saturday before, she went to the main Madison farmers market to buy whatever produce ingredients we thought would last through the week (the dinner was the following Friday.)

The day before the rehearsal dinner, my younger brother and I drove all over town looking for the remaining ingredients: sweet corn, potatoes for potato salad, vegetables for an appetizer veggie tray, basil for the pesto that was to be the veggie dip, summer sausage and cheese for another appetizer, crackers, tomatoes for tomato relish, and a few other random ingredients.

This is the Madison South Side Farmer's Market, which happened to be the only market around that happens on a Thursday. There were only three tents - a far cry from the main Madison farmers market which draws hundreds of farmers and thousands of customers! We were hoping to source a lot of the produce we needed here, and were a little disappointed at first glance. Once we looked over what they had though, we were happy to find a few things we needed. I've never felt like my farmer's market dollars were spent so well, or to such deserving farmers in need of support! We bought about 5lb of red potatoes, a few tomatoes, a bunch of radishes, a few cucumbers, and a few heads of garlic.

From here, we headed to the West Side to hunt down some local hard sausage to slice with cheese and crackers as an appetizer. This proved more difficult than we anticipated. We tried several places that touted their "local Wisconsin" products and had summer sausage galore, but on closer inspection we found that the sausage was only packed under the "Wisconsin" companies' label, or was made in Madison of meat sourced from a feed-lot in Nebraska or Colorado. Disappointing. It felt good to walk into these stores, ask about their products, and leave without buying anything when it became clear that they weren't really local. This is a great way to encourage these stores to source things from actual local farms!

We finally found some real local pasture raised summer sausage at Artamos Meats, a really nice specialty meat shop on the West Side. Score! From there we headed back to the other side of town to The Willy Street Co-op, where we were sure to find many local products. I worked at Willy Street before moving out to California, and it has remained very near and dear to my heart. We got a few more veggies for our veggie tray, a few more red potatoes, locally made Potters crackers, local butter from pastured cows, Maple Syrup for the apple crisp my mom was planning, some gourmet Wisconsin cheeses, and a few other odds and ends.

The only thing we were still missing was the sweet corn. We had hoped to find some at the farmer's market, but struck out. Willy Street didn't have any either.....we went back to my mom's house and called four or five farms listed in the Farm Fresh Atlas, a wonderful publication that lists farmers in the Madison Area. Every farmer we called told us that the season was over. We were about to give up, but decided to call one more farm, a U-pick about 45 minutes outside town. The recorded message on the answering machine told us that yes, they still had corn, although it was close to being done for the year. Score! We hopped back in the car (how ironic that we put so many miles on the car hunting down all this local food!) and drove out to the farm.
It was exactly as we hoped! The farm had an amazing array of veggies you could pick yourself, but the sweet corn had to be picked by the farmer. We told him we wanted 4doz, and he immediately got in his truck and drove off to pick them for us.

As we waited, I took advantage of their U-Pick flower garden to collect some flowers for the dinner. In about 15 minutes he was back with the corn - it looked great!

After we got back to the house, we set to work prepping a few things - time would be relatively short the following day, and we wanted to get as much done as possible....

I picked these beets from my Mom's garden, along with some basil to make pesto for a vegetable dip. I topped the beets, washed them, and boiled them while I made the pesto - basil, olive oil, garlic, walnuts, Parmesan cheese, and some sour cream to make it "dippy." My younger brother set to work on the tomato relish (local ketchup is non-existent, so we decided on relish as an alternative.) He pureed tomatoes with onions, vinegar and salt in the food processor to make a chunky relish.

Once the beets were done I skinned them (the skins slip right off after they're cooked) and then sliced them and dressed them with a little apple cider vinegar, salt, and oil. The pesto, beet salad, and tomato relish all went in the fridge overnight.

Here's my Mom with the flowers she picked from her garden. She added them to the flowers I had gotten from the farm, and made quite a few beautiful bouquets.

Friday morning, after getting a relaxing pedicure with the other female members of the bridal party, I set to work on the potato salad. I based it on the potato salad that my Grandmother Blodgett used to make - red potatoes cut thinly and lightly cooked, celery (n0t local, but essential to the recipe,) parsley from my mom's garden, all dressed very simply with white vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. It's pretty easy, but it did take a while to slice all those potatoes!

This was my big experiment of the day - an edible veggie "floral" arrangement. I'd never made one of these, but had been anxious to try, and this seemed like a great occasion! I started by poking all these bamboo skewers into this savoy cabbage.

In the foreground is the finished product - not perfect, but not bad for my first try! The hardest part was not poking myself with the skewers as a put the veggies on. You can see the pesto dip in the background, along with the crackers, cheese and veggie trays, and some local deviled eggs that my Aunts and Grandmother made.

The cheese and sausage disappeared quick! There were two kinds of white cheese that my mom had collected (I don't remember what they were....) plus some artisan blue cheese, and one of my favorite cheeses ever, the 7 year aged cheddar from Willy Street. If you've never tried aged Wisconsin cheddar cheese, I highly recommend it - it's everything cheddar cheese should be!

The veggie arrangement looked almost too good to eat, so I made a simple veggie tray as well - bell peppers and green beans from Mom's garden, cucumbers from the farmer's market, and Romanesco broccoli and watermelon (aka Beauty Heart) radishes from Willy Street. These radishes are one of my favorite things to use on a raw veggie platter - they're one of those little known and under appreciated vegetables they always catch peoples attention. The Romanesco also gained a lot of new admirers.

Unfortunately, those are the only pictures I got of the picnic. It soon got dark, and I was simply too busy being a hostess to take pictures. Needless to say everything was delicious! My younger brother did a great job grilling the corn, brats, and a few eggplant slices for the vegetarians. The total spread included a big bowl of potato salad, marinated beets, home-made sauerkraut, tomato relish, three kinds of mustard, four kinds of pickles, sweet corn with butter, and bratwurst with freshly baked buns. All this was washed down by local microbrews for the adults and locally made root beer for the kids. For dessert my Mom had made a wonderful local apple crisp sweetened with local honey and maple syrup, which we served with locally made ice cream and a pot of locally roasted decaf coffee. What a wonderful Wisconsin feast!!

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The wedding reception was catered by a pretty well respected Madison catering company, and featured a lot of local ingredients. I didn't get a whole lot of pictures, but I managed to snap a few:

The meal was served "family" style, with platters being delivered to each table for people to spoon what they wanted from. It was a Mexican theme: chips and salsa and margaritas before dinner, followed by tortillas, beans, rice, sour cream, a pico de gallo plus a red and green salsa...

These tamales were presented beautifully. They were wrapped in banana leaves instead of the traditional corn husks, and were filled with cheese, mild chiles, and masa.

The grilled steak was done to perfection! Very rare, and it practically melted in your mouth!

Instead of one big cake, each individual table got a little carrot cake. This was the head table's - the squirrel couple were adorable! It was garnished with ground cherries, which are a little known locally grown fruit that are kind of like sweet tomatillos .....very nice!

It was a whirlwind of a weekend, and lots of work for everyone involved, but oh what fun!!!!
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