Pumpkin Season!!

Around our house right now, everything is pumpkin! I have made so many pumpkin recipes lately, I didn’t even know so many existed! As it turns out, pumpkin is very versatile and delicious! Hopefully some of these will inspire you to try out some new dishes using orange vegetables this fall! I am still making more dishes and will post them as I cook them.

Pumpkin Pasta

I really enjoyed this pasta. It was very healthy! Joel didn’t like the wheat noodles, he prefers regular. But I didn’t mind them. I really liked the sweet flavors of the caramelized onions with the pumpkin. It is a great meal!

Pumpkin Bread

This bread is wonderful! Joel pretty much ate the whole thing, so I will have to make more soon. It is a wonderful snack. It has the consistency of banana bread, very moist and delicious!

Pumpkin Pancakes

These would be great, if I hadn’t have put way too much nutmeg in there. So I definitely encourage you to try these out since they are simple, yummy and seasonal!

Pumpkin Seed Pizza

The pumpkin seeds didn’t really go with the vegetables that I chose for the pizza, but I liked the idea. I will have to think of a topping that the seeds go better with. Regardless, we liked the pumpkin seeds, and I have a lot of them right now, so I will be roasting them soon.

Also, a note on the crust, I wrote that I discovered that I wasn’t adding enough water to the mix, so I put more water in it, and it was great, just like when I found it out at mom’s place. And this time, I mixed up and egg and parmesan cheese and coated the pizza with it. It made the pizza a shiny kind of golden brown when it came out. I am excited because my pizzas are beginning to look more and more professional.

Joel’s Pumpkin Pie

Joel loves making the pumpkin pie, so he made this one. He made two actually. And we love them!

Butternut Squash Soup

This one I had made many months ago at Joel’s place. We really liked it then, and we still love it now. It’s a great tasting soup.

Our Dinner Table

This is just a picture of our dinner table.

Pumpkin Candy!

I love these things!

Pizza!

If we have enough cheese and a pizza crust (only .33 cents at Wal-Mart!) then pizza is an easy dish that we can fall back on for a quick dinner. Since I’ve been cooking so many interesting foods, then we haven’t been cooking many pizzas, but we have some. Most of these pizzas have generally the same ingredients, but the caramelized onion pizza is unique! In the future I will have to post other pizzas I have made in the past (but don’t have pictures of) such as veggie pizza, BBQ pizza, cheese and the works.

Caramelized Onion Pizza

Blogging about caramelized onions got me in the mood to go through with making the pizza. I hadn’t been eating many onions for about a week or so. It was amazing!!! Joel & I loved it! We are definitely onion lovers! I used one whole onion and just topped the pizza with it. The other ingredients in the pizza were mushrooms, tomatoes and cheese. We just love onions and will put them on everything!

Cherry Tomato Feta & Mushroom Pizza

This pizza just tasted amazing, and I haven’t been able to recapture it again. Mainly because the feta I have now doesn’t seem to be very strong tasting, so it must not have been good. But the feta used for this pizza was delicious. The only thing it lacked was those black Greek olives. But even without them, the pizza was definitely wonderful tasting. The cherry tomatoes keep the pizza from being too wet, as I found out in later pizzas that were cooked with larger tomatoes.

Stuffed Crust

This pizza was almost the same as before, but I forgot to add the feta to it. But it was good none the less. I would say it still isn’t the perfect stuffed crust pizza, and I might need to come up with some kind of garlic sauce to add to the stuffed crust for more flavor.

Mushroom Feta Pine Nut Pizza

I guess most of our pizzas recently look about the same. But we just like them so much so we just change a little thing here or there. But I did enjoy the extra crunch that the pine nuts provided.

BBQ Pizza

Just over the weekend, I got to make the BBQ pizza for Tori. She loved it! My family loved it too! The "secret ingredients" all come from Cousins BBQ, a local family owned (but growing) BBQ restaurant. I used their chicken & sauce, and I am sure it wouldn't be quite the same without those ingredients. Its a pretty simple pizza with BBQ sauce, BBQ chicken breasts cut up, cheese and some white onions on top. If this pizza were for me & Joel we would have put more onions on it, but I tried to please the family. Also, it might have been nice to have red onions, but the white ones were good too.

Oh yeah, one more thing about this pizza, I made the crust a little different. When mixing the crust mix with water, I added too much water and made it sticky. So I added flour to it and it turned out to be the most flexible dough I have made. It formed a more raised round crust, more like what you get when you order a pizza. You can kind of see this from the photo. I will have to do this method next time I make a pizza because usually the crusts are kind of crackly at the ends, and not round and raised.

Chicken

Here is the next group of my latest chicken recipes.

Chicken Tagine Attempt

Technically, I was going for a dish called Chicken Tagine, but I ended up with something else. So I guess I will call it Middle Eastern Chicken Soup. But I am not sure if I should call it anything, because I don’t think I would make it again. It wasn’t bad, Joel and I ate it all pretty well, but it was just an accident thing, not something you want to make again on purpose. Due to the spices I added, it has an Indian or Middle Eastern kind of flavor to it. And it turned out this way, because I have a tendency to make grand substitutions and omissions, that couldn’t possibly work if I think about it, because I am on a tight budget and have to deal with the ingredients I have and cant go buy more too often. That tendency can sometimes produce some really interesting or good dishes. But more often than not, it produces a thing that is ok, but I won’t be making again. I am starting to realize that I do better when I only substitute or change small things, rather than over half the recipe! But no one can say that I am not bold in my attempts at cooking! In the future, I do think I will try again to make chicken tagine the way the recipe says!

Maple, Honey & Almond Chicken

I almost really enjoyed this one! I have now discovered the two reasons for why I have had such a problem with my chicken being too hard and not tasting as good as in restaurants and other places. The first reason is that I am buying the cheapest chicken you can find, which is also the Wal-Mart brand and its just not good chicken. I discovered that when Joel suggested it and I bought some fresh chicken (tastes so much better!) The second reason is that I just discovered this method of brining, where I simply soak the chicken for 6 hours in water with some salt and brown sugar. By brining the chicken, it is so tender and yummy! I discovered these two methods after this recipe though, hence the reason why this wasn’t a huge success with Joel and me. However, the recipe itself is good, because the flavors were great!! It was really yummy to have the sweet flavors of maple and honey on the chicken, and the crunch of the almonds were great! The almonds almost tasted like candy since they were coated with the maple and honey as well. I will be making this recipe again with good, brined chicken in the future!

Parmesan Dijon Chicken

This chicken I cooked before Joel & I got married, so this was a few months ago. The flavors of the crust were great. Again, I was using Wal-Mart chicken, so we weren’t just crazy about it. So I will have to make this one again with better chicken too. It was my first time at making my own crust for the chicken, and that was fun. I used wheat bread with grated parmesan and then Dijon mustard. It’s a yummy crust!

Spinach Chicken

I got this recipe from a magazine while we were at Hastings last weekend. It said to make this spinach mixture and then spread some on top of the chicken and then to roll it up and secure it with a toothpick. So the recipe was actually called Spinach-Chicken Rolls. Well, I was having a really hard time getting the chicken to roll up nicely, and I didn’t have any toothpicks to hold them in place, so I just gave up on the whole roll it up idea. Not to mention that I made more spinach mixture than we needed. I just placed the chicken in a baking dish and filled it with the spinach mixture. Joel was coming home right when it was finished, and he really liked the way it smelt. For a spinach recipe, it tasted pretty good. I can’t say its something that I would crave, but it was definitely really healthy and pretty good tasting considering it was made of primarily spinach.

Impress the In-laws Chicken

This chicken I might end up calling something else that is more descriptive of something in it, like Apricot chicken or Italian Dressing Chicken. I don’t know, but that is beside the point. A woman from my mom’s church gave Joel & me this recipe and the ingredients for it as a wedding gift. I am not even sure if she knew that I loved cooking. But it was a wonderful gift. We loved it and ate this meals 5 times in a row – not exaggerating! It was very simple. You just get some chicken, and place a glob of apricot preserves on top of each and then sprinkle this powdered onion soup packet on top and then cover everything with Italian dressing. It takes me about 5 seconds to prepare it, and then you just throw it in the over! So easy! And so yummy!! We will definitely make this one often.

Chicken Cacciatore

This was the first chicken meal we had with brined chicken. It was amazing!! We loved this one, for many reasons! As for the chicken itself, it was made with a small crust, I think of flour basically. It was very tender and tasted wonderful. The red sauce was great because it was thick and full of great tasting vegetables. But probably the yummiest part of it all was the caramelized onions on top. It was incredible!!! The sauce is kind of salty (you wouldn’t notice unless you tasted something sweet after it) so when you come across the sweet onions, then it bursts with flavors! The sweet flavor brings out the salty, and the salty brings out the sweet, throughout the whole meal the flavor goes strong as long as you still have caramelized onions on your plate because the flavors just keep refreshing themselves. I hadn’t experienced anything like that before, and Joel and I just loved it! This leads us into the next group I will post about caramelized onions!

Caramelized Onions

Here are the pastas that I tried adding Caramelized Onions to!

Pasta with Mushrooms & failed White Sauce & Caramelized Onions

This pasta had some problems because I cooked the mushrooms with this white sauce I was making. That was a mistake because it gave the sauce this strong and gross mushroom flavor. I don’t like mushrooms that much, but Joel likes them, and I really didn’t like that flavor. Joel was able to tolerate it better, but it wasn’t good. The other reason why the white sauce failed is probably due to the fact that I just put a bunch of ingredients in there without knowing if it would work. I can't recall now everything I tried, but I put cream and some cheese and stuff in there.

So we used it, but added red sauce to it to cover the flavor, and overall it was just ok. Definitely took away from the caramelized onion flavor that I was going for!

Pasta with Mushrooms and Caramelized Onions

This pasta is the same as before, although this time I did the mushrooms right. We had left over pasta made, so I cooked the mushrooms separate this time. It was what I was going for the day before. We enjoyed it, just a nice pasta full of garlic, mushrooms and caramelized onions. Its fun to taste that sweet flavor thrown in there.

Bean Pasta with Caramelized Onions

We like making bean pasta because it is easy and filling, but this time we tried it with the caramelized onions added to it. That tasted pretty good. We usually add cheese to the bean pasta (I would say I don’t like the bean pasta without the cheese) but this time with the sweet flavor of the onions, we didn’t even notice that we forgot the cheese until we were already into it. This marks the end of the caramelized onions for now, I stopped after that whole French Onion Soup thing. I haven’t eaten as many onions as then lately. I am sure I will come around, I am still on onion overload though. I was planning on making a pizza with caramelized onions on top, so I will have to try that out sometime later.

French Onion Soup Experience

I watched a video of Alton Brown making French Onion Soup and for some reason – maybe because I love onions now – I just couldn’t wait to make the soup. This felt like a huge thing, like a project I was really into. The intensity of the urge to make it was a lot greater than my usual excitement about finding a new recipe.

Getting the ingredients was really fun. I just discovered a Farmer’s Market in town, and couldn’t wait to go. When I did, they had many great looking onions for cheaper than at Wal-Mart. It was really fun buying something from a group of people rather than from the store. It was just different, and therefore exciting. It was a group of Mexicans who didn’t speak English well, but were polite. I bought about 8 onions and some cherry tomatoes.

Joel & I decided to have me make the soup on Friday for dinner, which is his day off. I had all the ingredients earlier in the week, and we both really looked forward to the weekend. Joel had watched the video too, so he was excited about the soup as well.

Here are some of the onions, don’t they look great!!

This was me trying to get all the ingredients together. But notice that I got apple cider vinegar – well I didn’t realize until I was setting out the ingredients that I needed apple cider, not vinegar. So Joel went to the store to grab it while I began the process of chopping the onions.

Just as I began to peel the onion’s top layer and prepare them for cutting, I noticed that a few of the onions I had bought weren’t looking so great. I lost about 2 and a half onions. I was unhappy about that because Alton had said on his cooking video not to skimp on the onions. So I went to call Joel, who was at the store, but I hear the cell phone ringing at home! I try to always have him take it if he goes out without me, but he doesn’t like to and easily forgets to grab it on the way out. Its just because he isn’t used to having a cell phone, and since it was mine before we got married, we mostly treat it as mine. But I realized that I had some extra white onions in the fridge, so I was able to make up for it. And by the time I was finished putting all the onions in a bowl, I realized that I had more than enough onions! So when Joel returned, I didn’t even mention it.

As soon as Joel walked in the door, all he could smell was onions! I was chopping away, and it wasn’t going so bad. He took a picture of me cutting the onions.

Not long later, though, it all the sudden heavily kicked in, and I was leaking tears all down my face. It was so painful!!! His eyes were burning just coming into the kitchen to take a picture of me. See all the tears?

I finally got all the onions cut and into the bowl. My bowl almost wasn’t big enough for the onions! Notice that the lid is closed on the onions. That was a big mistake! The onions were supposed to be left on high for about an hour until they reduce down tremendously. So after 2 hours of them not looking reduced enough and totally watery, I consulted the video. I noticed that he never put a lid on it, which makes sense since the lid would be keeping in all the water that I am trying to burn out in order for the onions to caramelize!

Now dinner is 2 hours later, which is bad because we had a big lunch and so had planned on a late dinner. Then another hour goes by and the onions still look like they were. That’s when I got out a candy thermometer that aunt Donna gave me and checked the temperature. It wasn’t even 150 degrees, and I was supposed to have it around 350!

I turned up the heat and it finally began to show some signs of movement! Joel is beginning to get tired and realizing that we can’t have this dinner tonight. I am still hopeful and try to get him to occupy himself with something for a while. But by the time I finished the soup, Joel had gone to sleep. The soup was officially done at 1AM! I didn’t even feel like eating it either. So I let it cool a little and put it in the fridge.

Honestly, the onion smell was so strong the whole time. It was definitely onion overload. I told Joel as I got in bed that I didn’t even eat it yet because I had already breathed it and soaked it and absorbed it completely! It was in my system. I know the pores on my face soaked up onions, my eyes were filled with the juice and poured out onion tears. And my nose kept the onion smell with me even when I went outside. I think I found my onion limit! It is really kind of a painful thing to cut and cook that many onions!

So here is the final product! We ate it for lunch the next day. I made some really yummy mozzarella bread to go along with it.

The bread had butter, shredded Parmesan cheese and mozzarella cheese. I used a French bread from Wal-Mart and I broiled it for about a minute. We love this cheese bread now, and cook it often!

The soup itself was a disappointment to us as well. It was ok, but I am still trying to figure out why I don’t like the taste. We think maybe it was the white wine and the beef consume. I don’t like the taste of wine, and Alton had mentioned in his show that you shouldn’t use a wine you don’t like the taste of. I also don’t care much for the taste of beef, and prefer chicken broth instead. I am hoping these changes would make the soup taste better to me, because I liked the onions and the cheese bread and if the soup itself would have tasted different, I might have liked it. So I am willing, even after all this difficulty, to give it a try with different ingredients.

Next time, I will make one to two servings, rather than enough for us to eat for a week! Also, since I know to cook it hotter, it wont take as long next time. I don’t want to believe at this point that I don’t love a soup full of onions. I love onions so much right now that I want to try again at making an onion soup! I will let you know when I give Melissa’s Onion Soup a try!