Pumpkin Pie

Today I made pumpkin pie, with no crust. Bryce was aghast.

It turned out great, I always thought crust was a waste of calories anyway. Real whip cream helps too. (I will trade crust calories for whipped cream calories any day).




Freeeeeezing and raining today! Just last week we were having drinks in the sun. What happened, agh!

Christmas Party

Our American friend invited out out to her house for a Christmas party. She lives with a bunch of Uni students-- most from Northern Europe. I'm not sure that any kiwis were at the party. It's now becoming a huge goal to hang out with kiwis; I'm finding that we're becoming friends with a lot of expats lately (not unusual being that so many immigrants work in the capitol).

We were all supposed to bring a dish to the party from our home country. I was supposed to make pumpkin pie but ended up bringing pumpkin bread, which another American girl at the party has actually had before. She said she found a recipe for pumpkin bread online after she moved to NZ and was trying to figure out what to do with the huge amount of pumpkin on hand. Just goes to show you that my NZ experience (specifically, the pumpkin experience) isn't all that unique :-)

We had a great time and even had our first glug (mulled wine). I learned about this wonderful thing called "shortcrust," which is a yummy, bread-like crust that you can use on pies and other pastries and can be bought ready made in the freezer section (the "short" stands for "shortbread"). Now I know that that was the crust that my student's family used for my feijoa slice earlier this month.

Basic Pumpkin Soup

Pumpkins were selling at New World Supermarket for only $4.99 this week. They are so tasty and nutritious, it's amazing that I can buy a huge ol pumpkin and feed us for a week on it. The problem with buying a ginormous pumpkin is that there's a lot of prep work involved-- a couple hours to cut, peel, roast, and mash. A nice strong guy is usually needed to make the initial slices into the pumpkin. I wish I had an axe. Or a jig-saw.

I make pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin lasagna, and pumpkin soup all week with my store of roasted, mashed pumpkin sitting in the fridge. Tonight was a combination of these foods: soup for appetizer, lasagna for dinner, and pie for dessert. Bryce has requested a moratorium on pumpkin for awhile.

Here's a great recipe for pumpkin soup:

3 cups roasted and mashed pumpkin (Or, 1 big can of pureed pumpkin, I think that's 30 oz).

1 cup chicken stock, vegetable broth, or hot water

1 cup milk or cream
1 teaspoon cinnamon
salt and pepper to taste (I put in about 1/2 - 1 tsp of each in).

If you have a blender, put everything in and puree.
If you don't have a blender, it's ok if you whisk it all together on the stove.

Sprinkle with parsley to serve.

pumpkin madness

I've been making pumpkin bread a lot lately. It's called "pumpkin cake" by coworkers to get around the idea of pumpkin being used as a sweet instead of as a savory. It is well liked and earlier this week a group of coworkers literally cheered when they saw me bring it in to the staff room one morning. One of my friends at work left a giant pumpkin on my desk chair yesterday that she picked up at the supermarket-- a hint, I think, to make more pumpkin bread. Our kaitakawaenga (Maori liaison) noticed it still sitting at my desk today and said, "Hey aren't you going to do anything with this?" Meaning: aren't you going to make something to eat with this? I gestured to my colored markers nearby and said, "Well I'm going to decorate it right away!" The strangest expression passed over his face. A little while later I showed off my painted new jack-o-lantern to him and others. I got a lot of befuddled looks and comments for 1) decorating a pumpkin and 2) decorating a pumpkin and it's not even Halloween. (When handed a pumpkin, what do Americans do? Decorate it, of course!) The kaitakawaenga gave me a hard time for being so silly with my pumpkin but then later came by my desk and said, "You know what would would make that pumpkin look really cool? A knife stabbed in the top or something." "Great idea!" I enthusiastically told him. I knew he'd come around.

Later that day, I showed off my new decoration to another co-worker. As an aside, she told me that to the Maori, playing with your food is taboo. Whoops! Well, for we Americans, pumpkins aren't really even considered a food (our pumpkin comes from a can) so maybe we can have a loophole?

I know, that's terribly ethnocentric of me to think that way. So, Mr. Pumpkin is now in a bag and his comment on his top, "Don't eat me!!" hidden forever.