In the Kitchen

I have been cooking up new recipes left and right lately.

This is a spinach, mushroom and mozzarella Calzone.  The original recipe just called for mozzarella and pepperoni, which I made as well.  It was really good and the whole family enjoyed them.  I frequently use my bread machine to make dough and that was a great time saver here.  The ingredients were simple and inexpensive:

4oz Hormel Turkey Pepperoni - $3
Mozzarella, spaghetti sauce and dough ingredients were already in my pantry.

Today I was inspired to make two dishes for our out-of-town company:

Ricotta Gnocchi - so good!  It was easy (I had never made gnocchi) and delicious.  I used home-canned tomatoes from last summer which I think made the sauce bright and fresh tasting.  Another less than $10 meal; the only specialty items I had to buy were:

15 oz tub of low-fat ricotta cheese $3
Fresh basil $2.49 (which I also used for the recipe below).

Fresh Tomato Shrimp Pasta - another tasty dish but sampling it after the gnocchi made it seem bland in comparison.   This dish had a few specialty ingredients: 

Fresh mozarella on sale at $2.49 for 8 oz
Bag of fresh spinach $2.89
Fresh basil $2.49
Shrimp, which I already had in my freezer.  You could easily switch out the shrimp for chicken to make this a less expensive meal. 

One change I'd make next time is to eliminate the fresh mozzarella and add some fresh grated Parmesean before serving.

Each of these dishes made enough for four servings with leftovers.

Epilogue

I froze my fresh pumpkin in order to use it in my Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, which I made yesterday.  I noticed a few differences in the resultant pie - the color was a little brighter, it tasted sweeter and the texture was softer, which I did not like.  It reminded me of the texture of mashed sweet potatoes.  I liked mashed sweet potatoes as a savory dish, but not dessert.

This leads me to wonder what is pumpkin pie "supposed" to taste like?  I assume that the pie that is made with fresh pumpkin is how the pie was intended to taste, but I don't like it.  However, maybe I do not like it because I'm used to pie made with canned pumpkin and my taste buds don't know what the good stuff tastes like?  Or if I had only been offered pumpkin pie with fresh pumpkin would I have decided I did not like it?

I do know this, I tried sweet potato pie once and no, I didn't like it which leads me to believe I wouldn't have become the pumpkin pie lover that I am today had I been exposed to fresh pumpkin containing pies as a kid.  Next year I'm back to using canned.

We made one other change in our Thanksgiving menu this year.  We opted to use fresh green beans in a dish that didn't include mushroom soup.  They were delicious and I will absolutely make them again.  Here is the recipe:

Garlicky Green Beans with Mushrooms

Cooked Pumpkin

I've come to the conclusion that there is no good reason to buy a pie pumpkin (or sugar pumpkin) and cook it yourself so that you can collect the cooked pumpkin for another use such as pie or bread.

I was lured into giving it a try because the smaller pie pumpkins were on sale for $1.50 each.  I Googled and found three ways to cook them; bake, boil or microwave.  I didn't feel like baking them for over an hour and using so much engery for such a small item,  boiling always makes me think about the vitamins leaching out into the boiling water so I opted to microwave.  Each pumpkin weighed 2 3/4 lb so I microwaved them for 7 minutes per pound.  After cooling I scraped off the cooked pumpkin; it was largely stringly, although I had thoroughly scraped out the seeds and guts pre-cooking.  The first pumpkin yielded roughly 1 1/2 cup of cooked pumpkin, the second a bit more.

I checked the label on a 15 oz can of Libby's canned, pureed pumpkin from my pantry; it yields 3 1/2 half-cup servings which is about the same amount that my first pumpkin produced.  The sodium was the other concern I had; the canned option contained 5 mg per serving, really nothing.  The cost for the canned pumpkin was $1.69 not even 25 cents more than my whole pumpkin cost.

So, other than the seeds I saved for roasting I'm pretty disappointed at how labor intensive this experiment was.  Unless I somehow end up growing my own pie pumpkins in the future I won't be doing this again.

I did just taste the toasted pumpkin seeds and they were delicious!  Here is my recipe:

Remove any stringly bits of pumpkin from seeds and rinse thoroughly.  Please the seeds in a small saucepan; add water to cover seeds.  Add 1 T sea salt to water and stir.  Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.  The seeds will look gray when they are done.  Pour cooked seeds into a strainer and rinse.  Drain thoroughly.

Preheat oven to 325.  Place drained seeds on a jelly roll pan.  Drizzle 1 T of olive oil over the seed; distribute the oil throughout the seeds with your hand and flatten the seeds into one layer.  Sprinkle 1 t of sea salt on the seeds and place pan in the oven.

Bake for 45 or longer, until browned.  Watch closely at the end of baking time to avoid burning the seeds.

and Salsa-ing

Looky who thinks she is Ms. Canner now? I canned 5 pints of salsa today - mostly because Hubby was feeling sad that I hadn't made anything he was interested in, plus we had a bunch of garden tomatoes to use up so, salsa it was.

He deemed it delicious and even though I had to supplement our fresh tomatoes with canned I did use the no-salt added variety so this salsa is just about sodium free and a perfect snack for him with his new low-sodium eating plan. My only disappointment was it seems a bit too liquidy but that's easy enough to resolve by just draining it a bit.

Cannin' and Jammin'

I can now check off another item from my list of "Things to do Before I Die" because today I canned.

I have been wanting to try to can for years. Thanks to my friends in the Motherhood Later group on Ravelry I have finally done it. We set a date and a total of four of us were in our respective kitchens today all doing the same thing; one in NY, one in Canada, one in KY and me in IL. Cool, huh?

I decided on Watermelon Rind Pickles - never heard of them? Well, the recipe was in my copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving so it must be a legit recipe. My Grandma also used to make them so I thought it would be neat for this recipe to be the one I use for my first try at canning. OK - I'll confess, it was also because if I messed up the entire job I wouldn't have to think about throwing away a bunch of expensive produce - we'd have just tossed the rinds in the composter anyways.

First, my girl and I got the watermelon ready. It was an average sized seedless watermelon. We were looking for 16 cups of rinds and I assumed one watermelon would do it.

She washed and dried it and I cut into it.



NOTE: There should be a picture here but *%5E@%5E$* Blogger is making me insane so you'll have to use you imagination. Sorry.


It looked great - perfectly ripe and delicious inside. But man, it had skimpy rinds - I couldn't believe how thin they were. How was I supposed to get 16 cups of rinds from this melon? I remember as a kid having big chunky rinds after eating watermelon. I think those were the old-fashioned seeded watermelons. Those big, oblong-shaped suckers.

So my girl scooped out the melon and I peeled the rinds, cut them up and put them in salted water for their overnight soak.

This morning we rinsed 'em, drained 'em and boiled them in a syrup of vinegar, sugar and cinnamon sticks.

Since I only had 8 cups of rinds I made a half recipe - three pint jars.




NOTE: Imagine picture here - again thanks to the idiocy that is Blogger




The jars looked so small and lonely in my new, giant 21-quart canner. But it worked, the lids seemed to have sealed properly and maybe I'll open one up for Thanksgiving.