Pumpkin Alfredo

I am having some technical difficulties the past few days. My computer has been going really slow and keeps giving me the 'magic beach ball of death' so all typing and computer activities has been taking longer than I would like. 

Secondly, my camera decided that working was over-rated. While I was making the below recipe I started with my real camera, but it decided to stop working and not turn on so the pictures below are all from my phone. I apologize for the poorer quality and missing the beginning steps of the recipe. 

My motivation for this recipe was SHOCKINGLY not Pinterest... I don't actually remember how I stumbled upon the website- but I wound up on Organic Authority   looking at pumpkin recipes
that all looked amazing.. especially this one for Dairy Free Pumpkin Alfredo

Since it is already a free recipe I think it is ok that I share it with proper citations. I barely changed anything from the recipe - and it came out awesome!

Ingredients:

•  1 spaghetti squash
• ½ pound whole grain fettuccini **(You can omit this and do all spaghetti squash to cut down the carbs if you want.)
• 1 pound spinach or other green (kale, chard, collard greens, mustard greens) 
•  3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons flour (All purpose, brown rice, whole wheat, whatever)
• 4 cloves of garlic minced 
•  1.5 cups non-dairy milk (I used unsweetened, plain almond milk)
• 1 cup pumpkin puree
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard
• Fresh ground salt and pepper to taste
•  Nutritional yeast or parm cheese (optional: note parm cheese if not doing a vegan version!!)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350*

2. Half and seed the spaghetti squash. Drizzle with olive oil and put on a baking sheet. Roast for about 1-2 hours.

3. Near the end of the roasting, boil fettuccini.

4. Add in the greens vegetable of your choice to the boiling fettucini near the end.

5. Drain pasta/ greens into a colindar and set aside.

6. In a pan over medium heat, heat olive oil

7. Add flour to olive oil, mixing CONSTANTLY until smoothish

8. Add in garlic and cook ~ 1 minute to flour and oil mixture, continuing to stir.

9. Add in the milk slowly.

 

10. Then add pumpkin, salt and pepper. Continue to stir. Mixture will thicken.

 

11. Add in extra milk/ pumpkin as needed to adjust consistency.

12. Remove from heat.

To Serve:

Portion about half spaghetti squash with half fettuccini/ greens mixture and serve with pumpkin alfredo sauce. Sprinkle with nutritional yeast or parmesan cheese.

I found it was also very good with a splash of hot sauce, but that is pretty much my opinion on every food.

 Of course my favorite Sous Chef was there to help supervise!

Apple-Carrot Soup

Apple picking inspired a lot of desserts- but I felt I should also make something a bit more healthy out of the apples - so I found a recipe for apple carrot soup and adapted it.
Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoon(s) margarine or butter
• 1 large onion, coarsely chopped
• 4 medium Golden Delicious apples - roughly peeled and chopped (I used Junga-golds -- my soup was really sweet-you could probably cut this down to 3 apples.)
• 2 pound(s) carrots, peeled and chopped  (I cheated and used a bag of frozen carrot coins)
• 1 pound butternut squash, peeled and chopped  (Used a bag of frozen)
• 5 cups chicken or vegetable broth  (This is used from scratch broth I made)
• 1 tablespoon(s) brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon(s) peeled and grated fresh ginger (I admit I just used ground)
• salt and pepper to taste (I used fresh cracker black pepper and NuSalt)
• Fresh chives for garnish

1. Melt butter or margarine in a dutch oven over medium - high heat.
2. Add in onions and cook until soft (About 10 minutes).
3. Add in apples, carrots, squash, broth, sugar, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil.
4. Reduce heat and cover. Simmer for about 30 minutes.

  5. Once Carrots and squash are tender, use an emersion blender to blend until smooth.

Serve with fresh chives for a garnish. Bon appetite!

Apple Pickin'!

 

Earlier this summer Jordan and I were traveling through Ipswich to go to the “Crane Estate” ( which by the way, we never made it to…) when we drove by Russell’s Orchard which had strawberry picking at the time (which is what we wound up doing instead).  

Whilst at Russell’s we ate cider donuts, fed the goats and chickens, and purchased some fruit wine, as well as picked an obscene amount of strawberries.

So this fall, I decided I wanted to go apple picking. So we headed back to Russell’s! 

 

I actually do not remember the last time I went apple picking… I am sure I did it at some point as a child, but I have no recollection of it. For some reason apple picking always reminds me of an old Care Bear movie we had that involved Hugs and Tugs apple picking from a magical regenerating tree—which I am pretty sure was a play on some bible story or another. 

 

Anyway, Jordan was telling me how apple picking was very intense and involved lots of climbing trees to get the best apples. Turns out that may have been what he remembered from when he was younger, but we could practically reach the tops of most of the trees from the ground.

We got a fine variety including MacIntosh, Gala, Cortlands, Jungagolds, and Fiji's

The picking was a lot easier than Jordan made it sound like it was going to be, half of the apples were already on the ground- and in pretty good shape!

 In the end, we may have gone a bit overboard... we left with 32 pounds of apples! 

Expect apple recipes in the near future!