Bread

A couple months ago, a friend at church graciously taught me how to make her whole wheat bread and let me have the recipe. The previous recipe I was using resulted in bread that I wasn't proud of, nor wanted to eat once it was a day old. It was called whole wheat, but wasn't 100% whole wheat. I don't know if it was the recipe or me not working it enough. I do know it wasn't the flour because I used the same whole wheat flour the first time I made this new recipe at home, and it turned out great. For the old recipe, I used my mixer for all of it, but actually enjoy doing it all by hand now, as my friend taught me.


She recommended I do that, particularly to learn how the dough feels and progresses. I should add that my mixer can't really handle 8-9 cups of flour for half the recipe, let alone 15-18 for the full recipe! She works in the last few cups of flour while working it by hand, out of the bowl.


Half the recipe makes two large loaves and one small one, which happens to work with the three loaf pans I have. I have only done this twice at home, but both times, made a cinnamon-sugar loaf with the small one.

Grapefruit?

Do you all like grapefruit? If so, how do you eat it?

Pink Grapefruit is pretty delicious, though I always sprinkle sugar on it. I cut around the wedges to free them for eating, a habit I got from my Dad. For years, he'd meticulously cut grapefruit halves for the first part of our Christmas breakfast every year (for as long as I can remember). we still have it.

What about you? Leave a comment.

P.S. My mom's mom eats it with salt!

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Before today, I don't think I ever ate pumpkin seeds. I knew Ryan liked them so I went on the search for a couple seasoned pumpkin seed recipes. Of course, I couldn't roast them all just plain and with only salt. I had about 4 cpus of seeds, so I used four different seasoning combinations. We liked each of them pretty well.

Plain with butter, olive oil and salt. I used popcorn salt because it's so fine.


Roasted Pumpkin Seeds (rosemary, salt).


Spicy Pumpkin Seeds (salt, cayenne pepper)


Lime Toasted Pepitas (surprise, surprise) Actually, these seeds are from the butternut and acorn squashes that I roasted for Velvety Squash Soup for dinner on Saturday. They turned out tasty like the pumpkin seeds. I had a little less than a cup of them.

Pumpkin Puree

Pioneer Woman illustrated how to make your own pumpkin puree, and I couldn't NOT do it since we received a couple pumpkins from the CSA farm.

Strangely, while the pumpkins roasted, they smelled like hay. It must have been the stringies that I couldn't completely remove.

My yield from three pumpkins was 10 cups of puree, which I froze in quart-sized bags, 2 cups in each. I don't know the cost to me of the pumpkins, but 5-6 cans of pumpkin puree would be at least $10.

Coming soon: roasted pumpkin seeds