green beans

Snack.

* trimmed green beans
* red onion
↑ steamed
* red tomato
* olive oil / aged balsamic / sea salt

hamburger

Simple quickie lunch.

This is the chuck roast ground previously for the stuffed dumplings, baked and steamed, that was mixed with a large percentage of vegetable material, onion, shredded carrot, and celery along with peas, but not with egg or breadcrumbs as you might expect. It also contains S/P along with drops of Worcestershire sauce, but not catsup or mustard. The surplus was frozen as hamburger patties, and here fried as such. Presented with some kind of delicate colored lettuce and an interesting not very acidic orange heirloom tomato drizzled with olive oil and rice vinegar. Sprinkled with grated Romano and gray Celtic sea salt, which apparently has a lot of minerals in it and tends to be hydroscopic. Purdy, in'nit?

butternut squash cookies

Roasted butternut squash processed to slurry with honey, ginger and orange zest, dropped by the teaspoon full and gently pressed and spread down, returned to oven on low, approximately 100℉ (half way between 200 and OFF, I didn't measure temperature directly, but not as low as the oven could go because that was too cool) started at 11:00 PM ending at 9:00 AM, so 10 hours. I should add this is happening in Denver where drying occurs naturally even without heat, but come to think of it, they're a lot like good sun dried tomatoes.

These are the sort of things hikers would appreciate. Less so children. The flavor is concentrated and bright. They are tight, tough, leathery and delicious. I must say addictive. They take awhile to masticate.

This makes me want to try cookies made the ordinary way with flour. Those would be great too.

butternut squash cheesecake

This is a 6.5" spring form pan because I don't want excess sweets around for longer than a few days. This is a good size pan even for a party because people usually act all, "oh-just-a-little-piece-for-me" about dessert anyway, then I end up with half a gigantic cheese cake, or even a regular cake for that matter I really don't want it around no matter how good it is because then I must take it around and beg it off on people then go around again to retrieve my plates or fell compelled to eat it and I don't want that. How else do you imagine I maintain my slender boyish figure?

I intended to halve a successful recipe based on chocolate and apply that halved recipe to butternut squash. That didn't work out as I first visualized. I could tell I needed more than half the amount of cream cheese and it wasn't possible to halve three eggs. Well it is possible, but I didn't want to. So it's possible this mixture turns out a little bit eggy. Maybe not.

The mixture is made more interesting with sour cream, 1/2 cup in the original recipe, a few tablespoons for this one. The original has a chocolate ganache topping, this one has a topping of sour cream (+ sugar +vanilla).

I didn't want spices to discolor the mixture so I left them out, although I did like the ginger and orange from the previous pie so I put those things in -- grated fresh ginger and grated orange peel, so-called zest because it's definitely zesty. Pinch of salt. I started out with 1/4 cup sugar, tasted, deemed insufficiently sweet, then increased by a few tablespoons. Vanilla in the mixture, because everything's better with vanilla. Woot!

As to the butternut: My mixer is such a clever thing, it has an additional shaft, usually covered, that allows a small processor or a blender to be attached. In that smaller processor which saves the trouble of dragging out another heavy-duty motor device, the Cuisinart, I processed to slurry 1/2 a large butternut squash that I had roasted previously and saved specifically for this. It does such fine job in that smaller processing bowl. Added the processed butternut slurry to the cheese/sour cream/ egg/ sugar/ vanilla mixture and tasted. Insufficient flavor intensity. Processed half a sweet potato that was roasted earlier and saved along with the butternut squash and added that too. So now, by weight and by mass I have exceeded the amount of non-cheese cake flavoring material that corresponds to the chocolate in the original recipe, which was a mere 6 oz. So I really don't know but I can intuit how the egg will set up all this gourd and root material. I do like to live dangerously on the edge of failure like that. I tasted again. The filling with its raw egg tasted excellent. So that's how I arrived at the filling. Call it what you will, I'm calling it cheesecake because it has 12 oz. of cream cheese even though it has more than that of butternut squash and sweet potato.

Butternut squash cheesecake <---See? Truth in advertising.

The crust is standard graham cracker crust except with ginger snaps comprising 50% of the biscuits used. Melted butter added to the crumbs and pressed into the pan to form a new cookie-type crust, just like normal, mindful that the ginger snaps had a little too much butter to begin with. Baked in a water bath on low heat (325℉) for 45 minutes. Allowed to cool down inside the oven with the oven door open, then chilled to set.

I am not showing all of the gourd cutting, roasting, oiling, scooping, and processing because it's boring and it's just a mess anyway. The photos are not instructive or interesting. And I will not show the mixing of ingredients because -- why bother? -- it's just a bunch of crap in a mixer. You've seen it a million times, you can imagine it. Eh, it was pale orange. Here is the finished cheesecake

* in a water bath in the oven

* removed from oven but not yet freed from spring form pan

* topped with sweetened and vanilla-ized sour cream.

* and way up there ↑ at the top of the post, chilled and served.

ginger snaps

I made these incorrectly.

Here's what I learned: 1) Butter probably doesn't work very well here. 2) corn syrup + brown sugar cannot be substituted for molasses. They're too flat, they cooked too quickly, and they're a little bit oily. They're delicious. Recipes all over the place with little variation:

3/4 cup margarine (I never use margarine, maybe oil would be better)
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
2 Cups flour
1 egg
2 teaspoons baking soda (this seems like a lot)
1 Tablespoon ginger powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup sugar to coat dough balls

Chill the dough. Form into walnut size balls, smash a little bit. Bake 10 - 12 min. @ 350℉, (mine were done in 7 minutes, that was part of their wrongness)

I actually only made these because I need some to use for the crust in a cheese cake tomorrow.

butternut squash, sweet potato pie

This is a small pie, tiny actually, because I don't want it around for a week preventing me from getting on with the next thing. Is that weird or what? It's made of one smallish butternut squash and 1/2 a sweet potato and there is about 50% surplus filling. The pie crust was started with 1 cup flour and 3/4 stick butter with another tablespoon added because a portion of the flour looked insufficiently butterfied. No lard this time, no Crisco. The dough was rolled thickly.

I cannot describe how brilliantly delicious this filling is. I taste tested at each step and enjoyed it all along the way. It got better and better as I went along. The whole process was rather impulsive. The roasted butternut is already sweet as it is and would probably be fine left alone, I hesitated adding sweet potato, but that did add depth, although already sweet and hoping to avoid the mixture becoming saccharine, I added sugar anyway and that made it even better. The sugar was creamed with egg which would be the thing that firmed the filling into a sliceable pie, (2 jumbo eggs) and a few tablespoons butter. Then vanilla, because vanilla makes everything better, then grated ginger, BANG! Nobody ever expects ginger, Then grated orange peel, which I must say was masterstroke. Melody and I ate the filling just like that, raw egg and all.

I Tasted the crust separately and I like that all by itself too. It would go great with coffee in the form of little cookies. Together, crust and filling, they're stupendous.

Butternut squash halved, oiled and roasted (1 hour @ 325℉) along with whole yams oiled. White and brown sugar, butter, and egg whipped in mixer. Rasped ginger and orange peel added along with vanilla.

Roasted butternut squash and sweet potato approximately 70%/30% scooped from roasted shell and added hot by spoonful into mixer while rotating to temper the egg/sugar mixture before adding in bulk. I just kept adding squash until I got the desired thickness.

Tasted, I keep doing that to see where I'm at, plus I didn't have breakfast. I did not add condensed milk or Eagle brand as customary for this sort of thing, nor milk or cream, nor spices because I didn't want the color to darken. I liked the way the uncooked mixture (raw egg) tasted but I did want trace spices to finish so I added them in a single layer internally. Filled the pie 1/2 way, sprinkled moderately with cinnamon and allspice, then continued filling and sprinkled moderately again on the surface. That's the only spice added, save for the ginger and the orange peel within the mixture. Clever, eh?

The crust is made the farm lady way. I should put a couple water balloons under my shirt to really get into the whole method-acting feel of it. Cubed cold butter smashed directly into flour seasoned with sugar, salt, and a little cinnamon. Continue smashing until the flour is fully butterated and the butter is fully floured. That's the best way I have to describe it. There should be small chunks of butter but not large chunks, and all the flour should have some fat connected to it. The flour should be fairly fatty, whether you use butter, lard, or Crisco, or any combination of those three. Then add water sparingly in increments while mixing and moving with the aim of using as little water as possible. I keep the tap running on cold and let it drip off my fingertips of one hand while the other hand is stirring. Just enough to barely hold the mass together. BARELY! It's fun, like Play Doh.

Press together in a wad, wrap and chill. This gives time for the water to disperse itself molecularly evenly throughout the ball via the miracle of osmosis, or summat. . Bakers call it "relaxing the dough" but I call it "allowing the water to evenly disperse". Chilling keeps the fat particles hard. You don't want the fat to liquify or to become homogenized throughout the flour because the slight irregularity of the fat is how you achieve flakes, the best you could get otherwise is crumbly crust which isn't at all bad but it's not as fantastic as flakiness is. It's why I chose not to process dough in pulses like experts recommend and it's why my crust is better than theirs, even better than Martha Stewart's. That right, I said it, my pie crust is better than Martha Stewart's. Press it out by hand, then roll it flat. It should be slightly crumbly while rolling and somewhat difficult to handle. If it's too cooperative, you've probably added too much water. You can either correct it with flour or proceed, it's your gamble. I like to roll it thickly for a stacked flake-flake-flake effect. As I already said, this dough makes excellent little cookies.

Pie shell pre-baked. It was not chilled first, nor was it protected with weight as experts do, so it collapsed a little and shrank slightly but not enough to ruin it. The top was decorated with extra trimmings and placed to disguise the collapsed deformity, but unevenly, zen-like, as if leaves fell randomly, which is completely irrelevant here because it will hardly last long enough for anyone to notice.

chocolate shortbread

This wasn't my best idea, possibly not my best execution. Maybe I should have followed a recipe more closely rather than just dumping things in. Maybe too much cocoa. They're too crumbly, a little too intense, if that's possible.

I didn't have a whole cup of corn starch so I substituted 1/3 cup rice flour. Also substituted aprox 3/4 whole wheat for white flour with the addition of 3/4 oatmeal ground to dust in the coffee grinder. Also included about 2/3 cup cocoa. That's too much dry for the 1/2 LB butter. I also substituted some brown sugar for white sugar and added confectioners sugar, so that's three type of sugar amounting to a total of aprox 3/4 cup. The sand-like dough appeared alright. It's not as good as the first batch down there ↓.