Pumpkin Butter Success Story!

I stayed up a bit later than usual in order to complete the pumpkin butter process. I used a recipe from "The New Vegetarian Epicure" by Anna Thomas. I cut the recipe in half to match the weight of the pumpkins I'd roasted. I even added the optional molasses. It worked. 

I did so while watching the last segment of the Ken Burns, "Hemingway" series on my PBS Passport. Damn, poor Papa. He really, really suffered. Repeated head injuries combined with years of alcoholism do terrible things to a person. Anyway, it was another excellent Ken Burns series and it kept me company while I prepared my pumpkin butter. 

After scooping out as much of the pumpkin that I could, I cooked it and all the spices and sugar and cider vinegar down before putting it all in a blender (blenders are SO cool) to puree it to a smooth and buttery consistency.  I look forward to putting it on some toast after I walk the garden and go for a bike ride. It made a bunch so I looked up methods for freezing it. Turns out you can freeze things in a mason jar- just don't fill the last couple inches to allow for expansion. Your lid might not like it but I expect we'll not keep the extra in the freezer for too long. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stairway Complete; Fruit & Vegetable Season Begins

Image
Just one day's haul of raspberries The garden is truly coming into its own. There's a certain point in the spring when you think, "Nah, we're never getting anything." Well, we're past that point now. Kiki made white chocolate raspberry scones with these. She also made beet-burgers (or, really, more beet sloppy Joe's): But the big news is that a major project - the stairway from the shed to the garage - is finally complete, and I can die happy.  
Read more

In which I magically make 5 pounds of tomatoes disappear

Image
 And made a very successful batch of ketchup.  Or catsup. The cats were up as I began the messiest of messy tasks, but they grew weary and abandoned me to my red nightmare. If you want to give up most of your morning while handling many containers of very threatening red stuff, make your own condiment!  I had planned to snap a photo of the process but where to even pause and do so? There was no respite once it began. So, all I have in what is left of the final result. Sorry. Terrible let down, really.  As for the artistry of the process, let my words be your eyes... Imagine- a colander heaping over with 5 pounds (about) of bright red tomatoes and three ripe plums. See the onion and garlic gently cooking in olive oil in the bottom of my bright red Dansk enameled pot? Gaze as the tomatoes get added once they have been coarsely chopped. They cook for 15 minutes until all the small cherry tomatoes have burst and the very full pot is bubbling -suddenly, in go the plums! They too, have been
Read more

Trains, Canoes, and Automobiles

Image
Kiki and I just returned from a round trip on the Amtrak to Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula and purchased a 2021 Nissan Leaf.  The Olympic Peninsula is stunning. The photo above is not enhanced or put through any filters. We enjoyed a weird day tour in a Mercedes mini-bus with our guide Mei and a nine other folks. It was a pretty cool bilingual tour (Mandarin & English, in that order). Also fun and amazing was the Chihuli Garden and Glass , Monorail to the Space Needle.  Seattle itself is just another urban toilet. I'm sure there are reasons why every large conglomeration of humans turns into a foul, inhuman canyon full of visible wealth disparities and panhandling junkies. That vexed feeling of having to shut off your humanity and walk past your fellow human beings or be taken advantage of and grifted and lied to is incredibly frustrating. We do know how to solve this, but I guess that society has decided to give billionaires more tax breaks on their private jets instead. Sp
Read more