So a combination of factors resulted in this uber baking/cookie day for me (and Jeremy):

• I needed to bake cookies to bring in to my office building’s holiday cookie exchange on Tuesday
• I had decided earlier in the weekend (after watching Bravo’s Chef Academy where that episode they focused on baking bread) that I wanted to try making bread
• Saws a tasty looking cookie recipe in December’s Martha Stewart Everyday that I wanted to try
• and after all that  baking, needed a quick dinner that could provide some leftovers for lunch for the week

So the baking began around 1 and we finished around 7. The bread probably took the longest overall (3 rising periods plus oven time, per the “French-Style Country Bread” recipe from King Arthur Flour) but the results were very tasty. Jeremy made the dough and then split it in half, I supplemented “my half” with chopped rosemary and kosher salt on top and we both sat on the kitchen floor staring through the oven window watching the bread rise for at least half the time it was in the oven, we are such cooking geeks.

The cream-cheese cookies with jam (on the cover of December’s Martha Stewart Everyday, couldn’t find the recipe, pretty close one found on recipezaar) were the most difficult of the projects. I had a heck of a time getting the dough to the right thickness without it warming up too much, in which case it would stick to the counter, or being too cold, in which case it would crack when i tried to form the cookies. It was at this point I also realized I don’t have a rolling pin, so I used an old Illy coffee can, worked pretty well actually but think I will pick up a rolling pin the next time I’m in a store that carries one. I searched the fridge for all the jams I had and ended up with strawberry-rhubarb, blackberry-raspberry, and peach jams and apple butter. Since the cookies were being difficult when I was forming the little cups to hold the jam they ended up opening up while they were in the oven, resulting in a bit of a jam spill. So theend results weren’t the prettiest thing ever, but they were really tasty, so now it’s a challenge for next time to get them to look as good as they taste.

The peanut butter blossoms (standard recipe off the back of the Hershey Kiss bag) were not nearly as feisty, I think I left them in the oven a bit too long as they are a bit drier/crunchier than when my mom makes them but aside from that they turned out well.

In between baking the cream cheese and jam cookies and the bread we tossed together a fritatta from the contents of my freezer (chicken sausage, peas and broccoli) and the remaining eggs I’d bought for all the baking. It looked good coming out of the oven but boy was it stuck to the pan and the resulting attempt to flip the pan onto the plate resulted in a bit of a fritatta fail but Jeremy pieced it back together and it was very tasty regardless.

And thus ends the cooking adventures for today, and the lesson? Things frequently can taste way better than they look 😉

Pumpkin tower at College Run Farms in Surry

So I’ve spent most of the day today (10am to 3pm to be exact) cooking, roasting, toasting, baking and simmering three different preparations for pumpkin. A few weeks ago Jeremy and I went out to a local pumpkin farm (College Run Farm in Surry, VA) and I bought (along with about a half dozen cute tiny pumpkins and some very Martha Stewart-y white and green and speckled orange pumpkins) 3 “pie pumpkins” (or sugar pumpkins). I had never cooked with fresh pumpkin before but figured now was as good of a time as any to try it out.

Pumpkin field, College Run Farms, Surry Va

Seizing on the cooking mood I had been in this weekend I decided to tackle the pumpkin-cooking this morning. I knew I wanted to toast the seeds, I had done that last year with tasty results using the Toasted Pumpkin Seeds recipe from Simply Recipes, but I also wanted a bit of variety and Jeremy found some tasty variations on 101 Cookbooks.

Halved pumpkins

Now came the issue of what to do with all of the actual pumpkin, roasting was definitely the way to go so after halving each of the pumpkins, scooping out and separating the seeds and stringy bits I roasted the halves cut-side down in a 350 degree oven for an hour (checked them at 45 minutes and they weren’t quite tender enough). As the pumpkin halves cooled I flavored and toasted the pumpkin seeds (conveniently the oven was already hot), the results, although a pain to get off of the cookie sheets, were very tasty, especially the sweet and spicy (sugar and cayenne) ones, that’s a combination I will definitely add to the pumpkin-seed-flavoring repertoire.

Toasted pumpkin seeds three ways

Looking around at two of my mainstay recipe sites, 101 Cookbooks and Simply Recipes I found some very tasty sounding ideas for pumpkin bread and pumpkin soup with smoked paprika. You can check out the recipes on your own but the general idea for the bread was 6 cups of roasted pumpkin, lots of spices (fresh grated nutmeg and cinnamon and allspice) and a standard quickbread recipe, and the soup was 1 cup of pumpkin, chicken stock, onion, garlic, apple, cream and smoked paprika with a dash of cayenne.

I was rather pleased with myself that I had exactly 7 cups of pumpkin from the three sugar pumpkins, no extra at all (although I still have one small sugar pumpkin that didn’t get used, that may become another loaf of pumpkin bread later this month).

Pumpkin bread

Using the pumpkin was definitely easier than I thought it would be, the cleaning and seed separating was probably the hardest part. This was also the first time I had ever done a pureed soup, I have to admit, I was a bit intimidated by the whole thing, but again, simple to do and really sounds

Pumpkin soup

more complicated than it is…although the blender did get a bit obnoxious with me a few times, spitting up air bubble soup rockets (yes, I’m creating a new term) at me when I’d open the lid, but I blame the blender, and not the soup for that 😉 In the end both recipes came out great. I was a bit dubious that the soup wouldn’t be overpowered by the smoked paprika but once everything was blended together the apple and cream mellowed out the strong smoky flavor and I ended up with some very tasty (and surprising low-calorie, about 200 calories per serving) soup. The bread came out probably the best I have ever done bread-wise, it was moist but also had the lovely crunchy layer on top and very flavorful with all of the spices. So with all of this I now have breakfast and lunch for at least half of the week, excellent 🙂

btw, all photos documenting the pumpkin-ness are up in a set on my Flickr page.

So Jeremy managed to acquire tickets to the U2 concert in Charlottesville and last night we went to the concert at the football stadium at UVA, what a great show! The city definitely has getting people into the parking lots down to a science and we arrived just as the lots opened at 5pm (the concert was scheduled to start at 7pm). We were guided to the parking deck next to the basketball stadium and then walked the mile or so to the concert venue with a stop at Foods of All Nations for some tasty sandwiches for dinner.

Our tickets put us at one corner of the endzone and in the center of the field is this giant 4 legged octopus looking thing that is the stage with all the lights and a giant cylindrical video display in the center. We were behind one of the “legs” so our view of the band when they were playing in the center was a bit obstructed, and they were facing away from us, but they were great seats as the ticket office had not sold the 12 rows of seats in front of us (since they were “obstructed views”) so we didn’t have to worry about people standing in front of us and had plenty of room to stretch out. (pics below, more on Flickr)

Muse started off the concert by playing “Knights of Cydonia”, which I only knew from playing it on Guitar Hero but it was great to hear live (and yes, I was playing the Guitar Hero fingerings during the song 😉 ), they played 6 more songs or so and then after a full out lighting switch and a bit of stage rearranging U2 came on to much cheering and flashing lights. They played most of their classics (Beautiful Day, Elevation, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Walk On, Where the Streets Have No Name (and Bono played an acoustic version of Amazing Grace to prelude it which was great)) as well as some songs of their new album. They put on a great show, the stage was amazing and a great time was had by all 🙂

Getting out of the parking garage and back on 64 took longer than it needed to, they were funneling everyone away from the “quick route” to 64 so it was very very backed up and it took us about 30 minutes to get out of downtown but we got back to the bed and breakfast around 1:15 and promptly went to bed, definitely a fun way to spend an evening 🙂

Well, this morning started as a cool, rainy early fall day so I had the thought to try and use my crock pot for the first time to make a meal (I’ve used it for appetizers at parties before but never for actually slow-cooking something). Of course, as is typical Williamsburg weather, by the time I got all of the ingredients for the dish and had things going the rain cleared out and now it’s 81 degrees and sunny, oh well, it should still be tasty anyway.

I looked around online a bit for a recipe that peaked my interest, was initially thinking of doing a pot roast or something of that nature involving a large piece of meat, so I Google-ed for “healthy crock pot recipe” and turned up few viable results so I went to the old standby of the Food Network website. That is my default place to go when looking for a recipe and I was not disappointed. Found a few “big piece of meat” recipes but the highest rated “slow-cooked” dish was Robin Miller’s Minestrone Soup. Reading through the comments it seemed like it was a very good and simple recipe that could take on a lot of variations, so I saved the recipe to my Instapaper account (very cool little online and iPhone/iPod Touch app that saves text versions of websites so you can access them offline later…although oddly the Food Network recipes never convert to plain text correctly and the ingredients list goes missing so I have to find the same recipe posted elsewhere), and headed to the store for all the ingredients.

So here’s the list of ingredients (with my various modifications inline):

(modified) Slow-Cooked Minestrone Soup

• 3 cups reduced-sodium vegetable or chicken broth (already had chicken broth  from a stock-up Trader Joe’s trip yesterday, is 4 cups rather than 3 but, yay more leftovers)
• 1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes (bought diced tomatoes with garlic and basil already in it to add just a bit more flavor rather than plain diced tomatoes)
• 1 (15-ounce) can white (cannellini or navy) beans, drained (got navy, couldn’t find cannellini)
• 2 carrots, peeled and chopped (ended up using 3, just scrubbed not peeled)
• 1 celery stalk, chopped (used 2 stalks of celery)
• 1 cup onion, chopped (used half of a medium-sized white onion)
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon dried sage (didn’t have sage so put in a healthy dash of poultry seasoning)
• 2 bay leaves
• Salt and ground black pepper
• 2 cups cooked ditalini pasta (skipped the pasta altogether as it had a tendency to get mushy, especially upon reheating, which I am planning to do to take the leftovers as lunch for tomorrow)
• 1 medium zucchini, chopped (they only had small zucchini so I got 3 small ones plus two squash for some more veggie goodness)
• 2 cups coarsely chopped fresh or frozen spinach, defrosted
• 4 tablespoons grated Parmesan or Romano cheese

I also bought some Italian sausage to bring in a bit more protein and heft to the soup since I was skipping the pasta and added in 4 cloves of garlic finely chopped, figured rather than a simple mirepoix as the soup base I’d go for a bit more flavor with the garlic. I have a lot of carrots and celery left over as well as half an onion so I may attempt to make vegetable stock out of what’s left. A reviewer on Food Network recommended tossing in a Parmesan cheese rind which sounds like it could be very tasty and then you could skip adding any salt altogether.

So essentially you open various cans and chop and toss in everything except the zucchini, spinach and Parmesan cheese (and squash and sausage in my case) into the crock pot, stir it up a bit, and then leave it be for 3-4 hours on high or 6-8 hours on low. About 30 minutes before you’re ready to serve add in the rest of the ingredients and let it finish cooking, removing the bay leaves before serving it up. Planning on serving it with some garlic bread and I think it will make a pretty good meal

Things have been going in the crock pot, on high (didn’t get it started early enough to do the “low and extra slow”, so opting for the high temp) for about 2 hours now, veggies are softening up nicely. Planning on cubing and cooking the sausage separately and adding it in at the end, also going to be browning/sauteing the squash and zucchini in the same pan the sausage browned in before putting it in just to get a bit of tasty carmelization flavor going on.

So, yeah I guess this is really “based on” the Food Network recipe rather than followed exactly, but that’s the beauty of soup right? lots and lots of variations.

I’ve been taking photos as I’ve gone along so stay tuned for photographic documentation and results!