Pumpkin madness

We don't really "do" halloween that much here, but there has been a distinct shift towards celebration this year, with the accompanying hustle and bustle you might expect in the kitchen.

I chanced upon an episode of Jamie at home last week. After cooking a few Jamie recipes from Annie's blog recently (sweet and sour squash, sticky carrots), I was keen to watch, it's been ages since I saw him in action. I settled for the "pumpkins and squashes" programme. I'm glad I did, my corner shop had some fine specimens in stock...

I've always liked these beauties...good to eat in so many different ways. Jamie says just to cook the skin. Cool. I'm not sure if this is old hat and everyone else knows this already, but it was news to me and I was very excited! So, I went and got my pumpkin and started with some really easy and absolutely delicious muffins.

Now this is my first foray into blogging about food so forgive me if it's all a bit clunky and messy and my pics aren't great.

Pumpkin Muffins

400g squash or pumpkin, skin on
250g light soft brown sugar (Jamie used 400g but I couldn't bring myself to use that much...)
4 eggs
pinch salt
300g plain flour (I used wholemeal)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
handful of walnuts
175ml oil

Whizz up the squash or pumpkin as finely as possible in the food processor, add all the other ingredients, whizz up again. Fill the muffin tins 3/4 full, bake at 180c for 20 min, until brown. Leave to cool in tins for a few minutes and turn out. Mmmmmmmm! This makes 24 muffins, be warned you may want to eat that many...

Actually these were so good, I baked several batches to sell for charity at Esme's riding school, and to give to friends.

Then i decided to make some soup to take to a friend's Halloween party. Again, very easy but really tasty.

Pumpkin Soup

3kg pumpkin, skin on, cut into wedges
2 carrots, sliced roughly
few cloves garlic
red onion- 1 or 2
fresh rosemary
2 sticks celery
2 litres stock
olive oil

Heat olive oil in a big pan (this makes a lot of soup), add onion, celery....then carrots, garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper. Chuck in the pumpkin. Sweat it for a bit then add stock and simmer for about 45 min until the pumpkin is absolutely obliterated. (About 6 minutes in a pressure cooker. Guess what's on my Christmas list!)

Blend it with a hand blender............

This bit was tricky for me as I managed to blow up my hand blender some time ago ;)

We enjoyed this with cheesy croutons

Fry some sage leave in hot olive oil to infuse it, then remove the sage. Dip some crispy/slightly hard bread in the oil, then grate cheese over it and pat into the bread on both sides. Fry in a dry pan for about 1 min on each side.

I still have the enormous pumpkin (pictured) left over so I'm going to make some more muffins, the sweet and sour dish from Annie and some more soup to freeze. I also fancy having a go at this ...but I still have all those pears from Jodrell Bank waiting to be made into chutney, and looking at that picture, I really need to scrub the grout....blush ;/

Anyway, thanks Jamie Oliver. After a looooooong break from watching TV I am going to be tuning into you more often.

And we had a great time at the party, with friends we haven't seen for ages. It was really good to reconnect. I miss you guys.

Scarcity/Abundance

This past week has been both terrifying and enriching.

We've always been pretty dreadful managing money, but I've really pulled my socks up over the summer and we're now super organised. In theory. However, this month has been a disaster beyond my imagination!...worse than when we tended towards gambling each month, wondering if we'd have enough.

Anyhow, miraculously, we seem to have managed to get by this last week with about £10 for food. I've been using stuff in the freezer and more store cupboard staples than I knew I had, but we've also not been short of fresh food. I find it quite remarkable that we haven't really gone short, in fact, we've eaten really well and it's not felt like we were scrimping and saving at all.

Obviously it's not sustainable! We are now really low on stocks of everything and it was only due to my stockpiling of washing powder and other expensive items that we managed in that respect. But it is heartening to realise that we can probably manage with less than we're used to, as yet another round of belt tightening needs to happen now.....

In sharp contrast to the scarcity of hard cash, we have been overwhelmed with generosity and an abundance of love from a really beautiful friend with a desire to share and give to us in a time when we needed support. This week could have been really stressful and unpleasant for us, but we were blessed with more than money could ever buy and it's really helped keep things in perspective. Thanks so much for everything Sue-Ann, I'm so grateful for your friendship. xx

We went to Jodrell Bank today, (just) to the arboretum. There's so much to see there. It was a repeat trip for us, we visited in the Summer and vowed to go every season to see the changes.

The autumn leaves were magnificent, and there was some interesting fungi about. The girls had a fabulous time climbing trees and pretending to be birds, with ferns for wings, and later, tails.

We had a picnic in the bird hide and just enjoyed being outdoors, it was incredibly mild.

Nature also gave us a treat today, an abundance of pears. We literally stumbled on them...all over the floor. They looked hard and not that appetising but the first bite gave a surprise- they were so soft, sweet and delicious with a fantastic texture. We brought a bagful home, very happy ;)

Bye bye sweet baby poo

The last couple of weeks have seen big changes in Magnus. He's now blowing raspberries, gurgling away, sighing, yelping, sitting up, rolling, sort of getting onto all fours, commando crawling and eating! Pretty much all these things seemed to start happening at the last full moon. Bonkers.

He was sucking away on the odd bit of pepper, cucumber, steamed carrot etc... but not really getting anything, for a few weeks. Then on said full moon day he demolished an entire banana. With very little mess ;/ Since then he has enthusiastically put away just about everything I've offered him, the one exception being fig! The sad realisation that my baby is getting big fast is dawning ever more rapidly on me. Baby led weaning is great fun though, how come I never knew about this with Esme?!

The big downside to eating "proper" food is that I have to say goodbye to the yummy buttermilky-popcorny breastmilky poos he's been doing and hello to.....well, you can imagine. That's probably waaaaaaaaaay too much information for most people but I'm not at all squeamish, else I wouldn't be so happy to chat about EC'n. Thankfully we are still 100% clean and pretty much dry too so the change of input doesn't seem to have affected output!

I found the potty-bowl I thought I left in the pub. It was in the car, full of stale urine. Which is preferable to in the Peel Arms full of stale urine, in my opinion ;) I hope Granny didn't get around to asking them for it! I've just ordered a portable dog bowl to use as a potty so we'll see how that works when it arrives from Australia.

I've also taken the plunge and ordered a nice babywearing fleece. Contrary to DH's opinion a warm jacket is an essential item for the UK in Autumn/Winter and not a frivolous purchase at all ;) The merino wool elephant hood I plan to buy for Magnus could possibly come into that category.... However, I've saved a packet this week by turning a £5 IKEA tablecloth into a new wrap! So I can cross the Didymos off the most wanted list for now, and, more importantly wash my beautiful Lana wrap (that has become a stinky rag of late)