Smashing pumpkin (pancake egg sandwich)

Posted on November 5, 2014 by chatty

A few pumpkins watch as I eat, yup, some pumpkin pancakes. Sorry, guys.

The husband makes a terrific egg sandwich that we like to call, the Greg McMuffin. What, you didn’t know the husband’s name is Greg? Who exactly is reading this, anyway?

He recently added to his menu the McGregle Sandwich. Yes, the name needs some work. It’s essentially egg, ham and cheese nestled between two pancakes.

So for dinner one desperate Sunday night I decided to one-up him, and pull out the always popular pumpkin pancakes, and turned them into an egg sandwich, though, now I need a name for ’em.

Egg McCha-gle? No. Egg Pumpkin Pancake Sandwich? Boring. Chattycha’s Most Eggs-cellent Adventure?

A little help here…

Bakin’ with Pum’kin

Posted on January 1, 2014 by chatty

I, like the rest of the nation, went a little crazy with the pumpkin during baking season. It started with Thanksgiving and didn’t end until today (well, we’ll see. I may be making one final batch of pumpkin pancakes this weekend). On Thanksgiving I made a pumpkin pie. A week later, it was the always popular pumpkin roll for a pre-school parent meeting. After that it was pumpkin cookies for a holiday potluck. Then came mini-pumpkin pies for the office potluck. Then pumpkin-chocolate chip-walnut bread loaves as gift giveaways. Pumpkin pancakes.

And, today, trying to rid myself of the leftover pumpkin, some pumpkin mini-muffins.I made half the batch with the chips & walnuts, and the other half plain. I also kept them in the oven a tad too long. Usually I’m a “get-those-out-of-the-oven-early” kind of gal. You know, they’re still baking in the pan even when you take them out. But I adjusted the time incorrectly when I switched to mini muffins from regular muffins.

Throughout the season I went through two 15-oz cans and 28 oz cans (threw some of one of the 28-oouncers away because it was going on weeks in the fridge), and nearly an entire container of pumpkin pie spice. BTW, the inventor of pumpkin pie spice (as in, one jar combining the right amounts of cinnamon; cloves; nutmeg) is a freakin genius.

Finally, here is one quick tip that I’ll share. Chinese dumpling soup spoons are ideal for doling out quick-bread batter into muffin tins. They’re also good for pancakes. I have a pancake batter doler-outer, which I got as a gift a few years ago and is also cool, but the soup spoon requires less clean-up. Also, they’re good for, you know, soup and dumplings and stuff. I have a cheap melamine set, you can get them cheap at Asian grocery stores. Do it.

A long list of recipes:

Granny Kat’s Pumpkin Roll (you can find a similar recipe on any Libby-brand pumpkin puree can)
Perfect Pumpkin Pie (yes, I’m traditional and go with the label recipe) and based my mini pies on this recipe
Pumpkin Cookies (my preference is to go lighter on the sugar and thus I didn’t add the icing to mine. But I forget that is my preference. If I did these again I’d use the icing, and they’d go from meh to wowsas!)
Pumpkin Pancakes. Already discussed. The kid has asked for them again. Thus, the already scheduled date for Saturday.
Pumpkin Bread: My go-to recipe for pumpkin bread is from the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook. You know which one I’m talking about? The red and white checked book? With instructions on everything? I think the husband must have gotten ours as a gift from his mother. But, i still refer to it even for simple stuff like, ‘how long do I boil corn on the cob?’ ‘how long do i boil rice?’ and so on and so forth. I looked for a link to the recipe online, this one is pretty much it, though the book has a lot more tips and options.
Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins Again, a little overcooked (my fault), but the kid tried and liked. It’s hard to go wrong when the ingredients include chocolate chips and pumpkin. Amiright?

Finally, I know earlier i said, no more grains. But that obviously didn’t happen today. Tomorrow, I’m sure. I’ve already pulled out the coconut flour from the pantry. It begins. Soon.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day

Posted on December 26, 2013 by chatty

A post in 3 parts …

Hope everyone had a great holiday! This year we spent it home in Seattle. On Christmas Eve day the kid and I found ourselves still shopping. Sheesh. Once that was over there was still so much to do. I made baked eggs for lunch, leftover ham & swiss cheese to flavor. It was good and bad. No worries, just an experiment.

Next it was the dough for our cookies for Santa. In our tour of local store shopping, we purchased a couple of CHristmas books at Ravenna Third Place Books, including Gingerbread Pirates.The child was pretty insistent that we leave Santa some of our own gingerbread pirates overnight. “Make it so!” I said (not really), but indeed we did. I used Eileen’s Spice Gingerbread Men recipe from AllRecipes.com, to a tee (well, replacing the margarine with butter) and they came out really nice.

As the dough chilled, onto the next project, Christmas Eve wontons. Is this a tradition? Not really, but it could be. I wanted to do something for dinner, didn’t want to do the SC. Wanted Chinese food, but didn’t want to order takeout. Wontons is the one recipe I know from scratch, so that was that. Once the wontons were made, we rolled out the gingerbread dough and cutout some cookies. Our skull-and-crossbones cutter acted as the hat to our Gingerbread boy cutout, and voila! A gingerbread pirate. We also had a few candy canes (aka the Christmas J), snowmen, stars and elves.

Cookies cooling, back to wontons! Wow, busy day in the kitchen. I still haven’t figured out the skin – filling ratio, so we had quite a bit of filling left. (Filling: gound pork, turkey and some chopped spinach with a little ginger root and soy sauce). Solution? Some pork/turkey meatballs to add to the protein of this dish.

Kid was the “skin hander-over” (didn’t want to her touching raw meat). An excellent helper, and she tends to eat the stuff she helps with. Sometimes. Maybe I was just lucky as she devoured these. Yay! Maybe just some pre-Christmas excitement.

Dinner complete, we were ready to frost our gingerbread cookies. Rather than making frosting from scratch, this year I let Duncan Hines help me out. Thanks, Duncan!

Arrr! This was the plate we left out for Santa. Lily added a carrot for the reindeer, a small glass of milk and a letter so that it was clear to Santa that he was welcome to these delicious cookies.

Phew! Santa enjoyed the cookies quite a bit. He might have thrown a few away because they were a bit heavy on the frosting, and he’s really not into artificial frosting flavor. Maybe that happened.

Christmas morning! Was a blast. Husband got me a sweet new DSLR. I’ll have to show off its talent in another post, as yesterday’s photos were just for fun, like this one, kiddo singing with her new Singalong Microphone:

Kiddo couldn’t wait to head to her grandparent’s house (translation: more presents!). On the dinner menu: Prime Rib (yum!), Yorkshire Pudding (YUM!), green beans (still delicious) and marionberry pie with french vanilla ice cream (tasty!). Not a great pic, but the lighting conditions were not ideal. This photographer is still learning how to use her camera, too.

A long last few days with a lot of food in the house. For some reason, this morning, I couldn’t help myself, and decided to test out a pumpkin pancake recipe (see this post for my previous history with the pumpkin pancake). This time I used Chef John’s recipe on AR (I used his banana bread recipe earlier. I found it ok, though I probably shouldn’t have tweaked it). One word: Success. Woot! Kiddo ate many of them. Maybe too many of them. I was pleased with the results, too.

Next up, some more baking! It never ends. Well, it will end at the end of the year. Then I’ll be off bread & grains again. For a while. After a month of totally unnecessary treats and sweets, all good things much come to an end.

Hope you enjoyed a fun and delicious holiday.

Pumpkin pancakes … FAIL

Posted on May 29, 2009 by chatty

I don’t hang out in the kitchen like I used to. Well, when I do it’s because I’m starving. Did you know breastfeeding is supposed to burn something like 500 calories a day? Not that it is on this body, but that’s what everybody says. So I’m hungry. A lot. Anyhoo …

I did happen to make some pumpkin bread a couple of weeks back. No pic. But I had leftover canned pumpkin so I thought I’d try to make pumpkin pancakes. I used RF Bisquick because I’m short on time these days. I also did NOT use our nonstick pan because it’s been sticking lately. For the regular pancakes that I made first, the new pan was great and I will no longer use the teflon pan for pancakes (a secret that the husband only recently disclosed to me. Gee, thanks). However, the consistency of the pumpkin pancake batter did not make for restaurant-quality (or even chattycha-quality) pancakes:

Pumpkin Pancakes Experiement

If you’ll note, you just can’t pick the cake up without wrinkling and smooshing it. Tastewise, the batch wasn’t half-bad. Tasted like, well a pancake with pumpkin/nutmeg/cinnamon/brown sugar. But the texture needs work. I didn’t have time to tinker with the ingredients, and I’m not that knowledgable in the science of baking and cooking anyway, or at least in this case. Don’t think I’ll be trying this one again.

Instead, I’ll stick with the pumpkin bread and biscuits. And muffins. And cheesecake. And carving, of course!