I am also a fan of thick soups!
Tuesday night dinner was my adaptation of my Mom's hamburger stroganoff. I put in extra mushrooms and extra nonfat yogurt (replaces sour cream) this time in order to use those two ingredients up.
Traditional 'pumpkin pie spice' has cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, ginger and sometimes allspice.
I use only cinnamon and nutmeg in sweet potato pie. (Some recipes don't call for any spices.)
Clove may be the troublemaker in pumpkin pie spice. It has to be used sparingly.
Before we were married, my wife was given a 'kitchen' bridal shower where everybody brought a spice and a recipe. (We had over a dozen bottles of chili powder as a result, it took us decades to use them all or throw them out.)
One of the recipes was for 'goulash'. It went something like this:
Throw everything you have in the refrigerator into a pot. Except leftover pancake batter, tried that once, it was terrible!
When I make pumpkin pie, I season it only with cinnamon and vanilla extract. The flavor is perfect. There is something in traditional pumpkin pie spice that does not go well with pumpkin.
Yesterday for dinner I made a small pizza with spinach and red bell pepper. I took a container of turkey stock from the freezer and made soup to go with the pizza. For the soup I included a little turkey meat (from the freezer), some celery, carrot and chopped kale. The soup came out great.
Unfortunately, it was a single serving.
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Happy Birthday to your husband, Chocomouse!
Italiancook, my fav oatmeal cookie is also the Quaker Oats vanishing recipe. However, I found this recipe on the Martha Stewart site, https://www.marthastewart.com/315977/healthy-oatmeal-cookies which uses part whole wheat and oil, no butter. I've made it a few times and it's decent is you are looking to cut down on butter.
On Sunday I made a batch of my usual semolina/rye/wheat rolls dough and let it do an overnight rise in the fridge. Yesterday I baked 6 rolls and held out enough dough to make a pizza for dinner (2 rolls worth of dough).
I have had a fairytale pumpkin since October, a kind that I had never bought before but was recommended to me by the people at the farmer's market who sell me my other pumpkins. I decided on Monday morning to roast and process it. I cut it in half vertically, removed the seeds, then roasted at 325F for two hours. Although it released a fair amount of water (somewhere between three and four cups total), there was plenty of pumpkin pulp to puree in the food processor. (The pumpkin has a small seed cavity.) Before pureeing it, I put the pulp in a wire mesh strainer and allowed water to drain. I am going to experiment and bake another pumpkin pie with it, as well as baking and cooking some of my other recipes. The pulp is comparable to what I would get from pie pumpkins in texture. I also froze some of it.
Today I made a chocolate layer cake for my husband's 78th birthday. I spread raspberry jam (made from the raspberries he cultivates and freezes every summer) between the layers, and made a buttercream frosting. It's the first time I 've made a birthday cake in quite a few years.
I have baked rye as well as semolina boules in mine. I grease it with Crisco, then sprinkle with farina before putting in the loaf. You can sprinkle it with semolina, but I find that farina does not burn, so I use it. King Arthur also used the bowl for their porridge bread (begins with Pomp--I can never remember how to spell it), It really rose over the bowl, so that recipe was probably too much for it. I think that a recipe that uses 4 cups of flour would work in it.
Time to start a new thread for our 2022 garden plans.
I need to buy some fresh tomato seeds (I won't start any mortgage lifter or brandywine plants this year, though, they performed poorly last year) and decide if I want to start anything else indoors. My wife liked to grow eggplant, though she doesn't really like to eat it.
I'm still toying around with setting up a hydroponics unit for growing butter crunch lettuce heads. I bought and read one of the standard texts on hydroponics, the 7th edition of Howard Resch's book, Hydroponic Food Production, but it is aimed more at commercial hydroponics than home/hobby sized units. It does have a lot of useful information, though. And I think I may finally have figured out what they mean by pruning the suckers from tomato plants.
I bet the King Arthur baking bowl would work for that amount of flour.
Here is a cute little baking cartoon:
Close to Home by John McPherson (msn.com)
Italian Cook--some kind of ceramic baking bowl (well-greased and perhaps lightly coated with uncooked cream of wheat) would probably work. I also think that this recipe would work well in a covered baker or perhaps Dutch oven.
We're having left over chili tonight, and probably the last of the cinnamon rolls (except for the two that I froze) if they're still good.
I'm still working on increasing the spacing between lines of text in a paragraph (known as leading) in the forums, but I think I got the font size fixed. I still need to work on the weird characters, and that seems to have gotten worse, I'm seeing them in other places, like after periods, even if I type the message on my PC.
Cass, I baked the Portuguese Bread today. (1) I used half KA unbleached AP flour and half Pillsbury unbleached AP. Turned out my husband was wrong when he said he found Gold Medal unbleached. It was Pillsbury. (2) As you suggested, I used the stand mixer. Thanks for the much-needed suggestion. My mistake was that I used the kneading attachment. The paddle would have mixed it better. With all that water, it was a mixing, not kneading matter. I let it knead for 6 minutes after ingredients were mixed in. I wouldn't call this a dough -- it looked and acted more like a batter. (3) The recipe called for the first rise of 1 hour. That was more than doubled, and I don't know if that matters.
(4) I used a bench scraper to pull the beautiful risen batter that had turned into a loose dough onto the pastry board. I was grateful this wasn't my first rodeo, so I knew to use the bench scraper to work additional flour into the dough. I didn't want to overdo the additional flour, but I don't think I used enough. My finished product is only 3-1/2" high, which looks shorter than the picture. It is also much wider than the picture. The dough was luxurious and airy. It felt wonderful to work with. It reminded me somewhat of KA's Tuscan-Style bread dough.
(5) I didn't make a biga, Cass. I couldn't find anything in the KABC's blogs that told me how to make a biga out of this recipe. I called their hotline and didn't net an answer.
(6) My husband has plans for the bread -- he wants to use it for bruschetta. I gave him your instructions about oiling and peppering the bread. I'm sure he'll try that tonight with the Portuguese olive oil. I'll report back on Saturday about how it looks inside and on the taste.
Thanks, Cass, for your help with this. The recipe leaves out some important details, and I'm glad I wasn't a novice with this recipe. If I like the taste, I'll probably make it again, paying attention to how much extra flour I use on the board to make it into a workable dough.
Skeptic--I agree that it is cheating to count self-rising flour as a single ingredient.
I have seen White Lily in the store here but have not felt a need to try it.
On Thursday, I baked my version of the KABC recipe Ginger Pumpkin Braid. I substituted 2 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour for that much bread flour. I use my own pumpkin puree, (about 1 3/4 cups), so I needed to add another 3 Tbs. bread flour. I added 1/3 cup special dry milk and 1/4 cup flax meal to increase nutrition and cut the salt by a third. I replaced the 4 Tbs. of melted butter with 3 Tbs. avocado oil. I heated both the golden raisins and the dried ginger in bowls with a little water in the microwave, then allowed them to rest before adding them to the dough. I was able to use the bread machine for the kneading. Making the six braids is a challenge, but this time I did not have to unbraid. I do need to try to get the bread stretched out longer rather than fatter and to tuck the end so that it does not separate. I had to bake it covered with foil for an additional 5 minutes, as it did not test done but was overbrowning. (I skipped the egg wash.)
I baked this bread to have something special for New Year's Eve and Day (and a little beyond). A slice goes nicely with breakfast, afternoon tea, or as a snack.
