A Cornucopia of Pumpkin

I love Thanksgiving, and in celebration of this week of prepping turkeys and peeling potatoes, I've decided to make a post about all the things I've been making with pumpkins. I had been wanting to make pancakes, pumpkin, to be more specific and made a regular sweet breakfast pancake and made a savory one as well.

For the breakfast pumpkin pancakes I used Bob's 10 Grain pancake mix and added three quarters of a cup pumpkin puree and a little bit of cardamom and cinnamon. For the savory pancakes I found a recipe in the The New Moosewood Cookbook for sweet potato pancakes and adapted it for the use of pumpkin.

 Savory Pumpkin Pancakes adapted from The Moosewood New Classics Cookbook
1 1/2cups of pureed pumpkin

 1/3 of onion coarsely grated 
2 tablespoons of lemon juice 
salt and pepper to taste
2 beaten eggs
1/3 cup flour 


1. Combine all ingredients and mix well. 
2 Heat a small amount of oil in a skillet until it is very hot. 
3. Spoon batter and form thin pancakes patting the batter down, frying on both sides until brown. 
4. Serve hot with sour cream or applesauce. 


These were both wonderful treats. I think I am more partial to the savory pancakes, I was really impressed with the way they turned out. and I don't know why I had never thought of a doing a savory pumpkin pancake. But it is definitely not going to be the last time. Maybe next time some green onions or chives or bacon would be really good.

Happy Thanksgiving

Everything Good Inside a Pumpkin

I've been staring at my pumpkin hoping it would give me inspiration. I knew I was not going to carve it for Halloween and making a dessert seemed like an easy way out. I found a recipe on epicurious for Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good and I was sold. On the way to the grocery store to buy ingredients we heard the same recipe on NPR. It was fortuitous.
We did change some things. We eliminated the bread and added some cooked rice making it a loose risotto. I also added tasso ham, which is a Cajun ham with a bit of a kick. Everything else was about the same as the recipe. Within a half hour of being in the oven it immediately started smelling amazing. After two hours of waiting and impatiently switching the oven light off and on to watch for bubbling and browning, the pumpkin was done.

This is what it looked like when we removed it from the oven

As we ate, we discussed the various ways of how we could make this again. Even a sweet pumpkin was discussed, a sort of pie without the crust. It was decreed that stuffed pumpkin would be on the menu for Thanksgiving. I wonder how stuffing in the pumpkin would work?

This is the pumpkin carcass. As you can see we didn't like it at all.