Fall Pumpkin Recipes

The weather has been cooling down and I've been particularly tempted to make some fall-inspired dishes. Some of my favourite fall ingredients are pumpkin and squash, so those took a major place in the dishes that I cooked this week.

I've made several pumpkin pies in the last few years, but I've never made one with fresh pumpkin puree, as the canned always seemed more convenient. Today, however, I purchased a pie pumpkin for $2 with the purpose of using it in pumpkin pie. I chose to follow the joy of baking website's recipe for the filling, while I used the "Earth To Table" cookbook's recipe for a pate brisee crust. Since the recipe for the filling didn't give directions on how to prepare the puree, I improvised by cutting the stem off the pumpkin, cutting the pumpkin in half, and roasting it in the oven for approximately a half hour at 450 degrees Fahrenheit until the flesh was tender. Once the puree was done, making the filling was easy by scraping two cups of the flesh out of the pumpkin and mixing it with just some eggs, spices, brown sugar, and evaporated milk. I really enjoyed the flavour of the pie as it was slightly more pumpkin-y and less sweet than other pumpkin pies.

Pumpkin Soup

Since the recipe for the pumpkin pie filling used such a small amount of the pie pumpkin's flesh, I decided to use the rest of it to make a pureed pumpkin soup. My family has sage growing in our garden and so my sister and I decided to use it to gain some earthiness in the soup. It ended up being really delicious and fresh tasting. Here is a recipe of what we did:

Ingredients

1/2 a roasted pie pumpkin
4 tbsp butter divided in half
1 onion, diced
chicken, beef, or vegetable stock, or water to cover (we used a cup of chicken stock, and lots of water to cover)
6 sage leaves, julienne
salt and pepper to taste
2 or 3 pinches nutmeg
3 or 4 tsp brown sugar

Directions

1. Melt two tablespoons of the butter in a saucepan and saute onion until translucent
2. Scoop the roasted flesh out of the pumpkin and add to your saucepan
3. Cover immediately with water or stock, and season with sage leaves, salt and pepper, nutmeg, and brown sugar, and heat through completely
4. Puree soup with a handheld blender or in a food processor
5. Finish by melting in the two remaining tablespoons of butter
6. Check seasonings and serve

Julia Child Recipes

 Recently I've been making different Julia Child recipes like boeuf bourguingnon, ratatouille, and chocolate mousse. My sister and I have owned her books "Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 and 2" for a couple years now and have tried several recipes from them, namely leek and potato soup, french bread, and chicken in wine, but the books are so chalk full of things to make that we barely made a dent in them.

Boeuf Bourguingnon

The boeuf bourguingnon is something I made only once previously and is a wonderful lesson in several good cooking techniques that amount to a flavourful dish. I get annoyed by stew recipes or crock pot recipes that assume that throwing everything in and letting it simmer is going to create something extremely delicious, because while they usually taste fine, they are never amazing. With the series of techniques that this stew uses, it turns out to be something that you would want to eat all the time.

Bacon is browned and then the beef is seared, and later the vegetables are sauteed, directly in the bacon fat. The beef is then set in the oven with a coating of flour to help brown it. Then you add the sauce, which consists of red wine, beef stock, tomato paste, garlic, bay leaf, and salt and pepper. Similar to the coq au vin recipe, which I've written about in a previous post, you finish the stew off with sauteed mushrooms and brown-braised pearl onions.

Ratatouille

Later, I tested out Julia Child's ratatouille recipe which is time consuming with a step-by-step process necessary to getting both the fresh and stewed flavour of this dish. For starters, each vegetable is cooked separately by sauteeing in olive oil. Then they are layered prettily and slowly cooked on the stove until done. Since I don't have a casserole dish that works on my stove, as well as oven, I chose to do this last step in the oven. Although you could eat this on its own, I chose to serve it with sausage and roasted garlic potatoes.

Chocolate Mousse

The chocolate mousse is one of my favourite recipes of Julia Child's that I have tried and trumps any other chocolate mousse recipe that I know of. It doesn't use any cream, but rather thickened egg yolks and sugar that the melted chocolate and butter mixture is stirred into. Then the whipped egg whites are folded in and the mixture is refrigerated until set. The part that really makes this mousse great is the addition of orange liqueur. I'm not really knowledgeable when it comes to buying spirits, but the salesperson at my local liqueur store assured me that Triple Sec would be a terrific choice and it was.