// December 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cooking
As part of my not-really-a-hippie-but-kind-of-wish-I-was attitude, I think cooking with whole, fresh foods is a good idea, rather than relying on canned. However, I’m way, way too busy or lazy or something to really adapt to that lifestyle. Every once in a while, though, I bite the bullet and realize that sometimes, it’s really no harder to cook with whole foods than to use convenient, frozen, canned, prepackaged stuff. Most of the time, it tastes better, too. For example, I just ran out of chicken broth from my Whole Chicken in a Crock Pot, and rather than buying canned broth to replace it, I bought another chicken, cooked it, and made nearly nine cups of chicken broth, which will be great for all those winter soups I plan on making. This is a virtually effortless cooking method that gets me several meals worth of chicken and broth.
The Amazing Amanda sent me a recipe for baking a whole pumpkin and making pumpkin puree. I didn’t get a chance to try this, because she sent the recipe after Thanksgiving, and I can’t find pumpkins at the store right now. Just canned puree. I’m keeping my eye out, though, because I really want to try this. Most versions of baking a pumpkin that I’ve seen require cutting the pumpkin and scooping the innards before baking. That’s really a lot of effort. Amanda’s version makes it easy to cut the pumpkin. Here are her instructions, copied and pasted from an email and not all edited for putting on a blog:
Wash your pumpkin. Coat it with oil. Not cooking spray. Oil. It DOES make a difference. It will be very slippery and heavy, so do all the greasing on a foil lined baking sheet. Place the whole thing – stem and all, still on the baking sheet – into a preheated 400 degree oven and bake for 60-90 minutes. When it is done cooking, your smoke alarm will go off. (Just kidding – that only happens if you assume cooking spray an equivalent of cooking oil.) It’s done when a butter knife slices through the pumpkin like butter. Let it cool, cut it in half, remove all pulp and seeds, cut into chunks, and drain off as much liquid as possible. Put the chunks into a blender or food processor and make a puree!! You may want to strain this using cheesecloth to get rid of excess liquid. (More concentrated and flavorful for cooking that way.) Then use it as you would canned pumpkin - make pumpkin butter (pectin, sugar, spices and simmer..mmm), use for pumpkin bread/muffins/pancakes, or even as homemade baby food!
Easy fasheezy. Now–if you’ve got all that fresh, delicious pumpkin puree (or canned pumpkin), here are a couple of recipes for you: Pumpkin Butter (that Amanda got from Southern Living) and Pumpkin Spice Latte Syrup (that I got from Cook Like a Champion via Pinterest). These are both SOOOOOO good, I swear.
Pumpkin Butter
- 2 1/4 cup sugar
- 3 Tbsp powdered pectin
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp ground allspice
- 1 (16oz) can pumpkin or two cups of pumpkin puree
Combine all ingredients in a medium saucepan; bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Boil 1 minute, stirring constantly.
Remove from heat and cool; spoon into jars.
Cover and refrigerate up to 3 weeks or freeze up to 3 months. Yield: 3 cups
This could be a great do it yourself gift, when packaged in a cute jar and given with a loaf of home-baked bread. It is awesome on warm biscuits. My one problem with this is that Hot Husband won’t eat it because it has so much sugar in it, and Bear won’t eat it because it’s brown, I think. That leaves it all for me which is both fantastic (for my tastebuds) and terrible (for my waistline). I’ve seen other pumpkin butter recipes that call for juice instead of sugar, so I might try one of those in the future for a lower-sugar option.
Pumpkin Spice Syrup for Pumpkin Spice Lattes (or anything else you can think of)
- 1 1/2 cups water
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 4 cinnamon sticks or 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 3 tablespoons pumpkin purée
Combine water and sugar in a medium pot over medium heat. Cook until sugar has completely dissolved. Whisk in remaining ingredients. Cook for about 6 minutes, stirring frequently. Do not allow mixture to come to a boil. Strain syrup through cheesecloth into a large glass measuring cup. Do not skip this step. Here is the spice-sludge that you’ll have:
Transfer to bottle of your choice and store in the refrigerator. It makes about two cups:
Though the directions I read said that it is better to use cinnamon sticks, they are just too expensive, I think. I made it with stick cinnamon this time, but since I strained it through cheesecloth anyway, next time I’ll make it with ground cinnamon. I doubt I’ll notice much difference, but we’ll see.
Cook Like a Champion says, “To make a pumpkin spice latte, simply add about 1 1/2 tablespoons of syrup for each shot of espresso. For an iced latte, stir together syrup and espresso before adding desired amount of cold milk. For a hot latte, add frothed milk and stir to combine. Top with whipped cream, if desired.” I just put a tablespoon or so in my morning coffee and added a splash of skim milk. YUM! I think this would also be good in hot chocolate, too. It smells so Christmas-y and delicious. I plan on always having this on hand.
for butter. Yum. I had only 1 T. butter in my fridge, so I used butter in the batter (say it three times fast) and coconut oil in the topping (Notice the white blob in the picture of the topping? That’s coconut oil at room temperature). Worked great for me! Coconut oil is healthier than butter, so it’s a good choice. Also, you could probably just take a big dollop of your 
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