Pumpkin soup with crème fraiche, toasted walnuts and rosemary

 

 When life gives you lemons, sometimes it also gives you lots of pumpkins, and you make pumpkin soup because it seems Thanksgiving-ish.Thank you pumpkin patch.

Pumpkin soup with toasted walnuts and rosemary
Adapted from “Sunday Soup” by Betty Rosbottom
Note: The original recipe called for a more convoluted way of cooking pumpkin than I usually use, so I went with my standard method of cutting the pumpkin in half, scooping out the seeds and stringy bits, drizzling the inside with olive oil and roasting, cut side down on a parchment-lined baking sheet for 30 to 40 minutes at 425 degrees, depending on size, until flesh is tender. Discard skins and cut into chunks or puree. The original recipe called for a 5-pound pumpkin, but all ours seem to be weighing in at 3 pounds, so I supplemented with some canned puree to make up the difference.

Ingredients
2 tablespoon butter
1½ cups chopped leeks
5½ cups roasted pumpkin, cut in chunks or pureed
6 cup chicken stock
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves
2 teaspoons kosher salt
⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1½ cups crème fraiche, divided
⅓ cup chopped walnuts, toasted
6 fresh rosemary sprigs for garnish

Method
In a large heavy pot, melt butter. Add leeks and cook until softened. Add roasted pumpkin, chicken stock, rosemary, salt and cayenne. Bring to a simmer and cook about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool slightly before pureeing mixture. Stir in 1 cup of crème fraiche and heat through. Serve with an additional dollop of crème fraiche, walnuts and a rosemary spring. Serves 6 first-course portions.

Rating: It seemed like it could hardly go wrong, and it didn't. Nice and creamy, with the teensy-weensiest bit of heat balancing out the sweetness of pumpkin and rosemary. Pretty too. I'd make it again, with squash if necessary if the squirrels don't plant more pumpkin patches next year.   

Those pumpkin seeds got tossed with a bit of olive oil, sea salt and Tajin and roasted for 25 minutes at 375. Free snacks, another bonus.

 

Crab rangoon pizza

 

There are cheese pizzas and then there are pizza ideas that are potentially cheesy. I first heard of crab rangoon pizza when some of the Fong's Pizza locations in Iowa closed and commenters were lamenting the demise of a source of this pizza variation. A little research indicates this oddity has spread and has been available on the menu locally at Day Block Brewing, where the beer list is likely to make cheesy ideas seem less of a stretch.

Crab rangoon pizza
The recipe started with an amalgam of several recipes I found online and my standard crab rangoon wonton recipe, and then I experimented a few times until I came up with something workable. Dinnerthendesert.com and the Brownie Bites Blog were among the more useful sources. You can either use purchased sweet chili sauce or make the recipe that follows.

Ingredients
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 large garlic cloves, chopped
½ tablespoon toasted sesame oil
½ tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
¼ teaspoon onion powder
1 (4.25-ounce) can crab meat, divided
2 green onions, chopped, divided
½ cup grated mozzarella
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan
5 to 6 tablespoons sweet chili sauce, divided
Premade wonton crisps for garnish
1 prebaked or parbaked pizza crust

Method
Preheat oven to 425. Combine cream cheese, garlic, sesame oil, Worcestershire sauce and onion powder in a small bowl. 

Set aside 2 tablespoons of the crab meat. Stir the rest into the cream cheese mixture. Set aside a generous tablespoon of green onions for garnish. Put the rest in the bowl with the cream cheese mixture and mix well.

Place prebaked crust on a pizza pan, or else parbake a crust on a pizza stone. Spread cream cheese mixture over crust. Top with remaining crab meat. Sprinkle cheeses over the top and drizzle with some sweet chili sauce. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes (for a parbaked crust) or 10 to 12 (for a prebaked crust like a Boboli) or under golden brown. (Remove from oven and top with wonton crisps, remaining green onions and some more sweet chili sauce.

Sweet chili sauce
From dinnerthendessert.com

Ingredients
¾ cup sugar
⅓ cup white vinegar
⅔ cup water
¼ cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon ketchup
2 tablespoons cornstarch

Method
Combine all ingredients in a small sauce pan and cook until the mixture comes to a boil and thickens. You will have tons leftover, so if you don’t use sweet chili sauce often, you might want to cut it in at least half. 

Rating: Can there be an authentic crab rangoon pizza? (Or even authentic crab rangoon, when you think about it.) I have no idea whether this is anything like the original restaurant version, because I've never had it. But since it seems we're unlikely to eat inside a restaurant any time soon, I figured I might as well try it. The first version I made had way too much cream cheese, and the crust clearly couldn't stand up to all that moisture. So we dialed back the cream cheese the next time and used a prebaked crust. I'd say this version works well enough, at least as an oddity. If we survive long enough, perhaps some day we'll run across it on a menu.

 

Happy Halloween

 

I once intentionally grew pumpkins. It was one of my first forays into growing things from seed as a kid. It was not a particularly auspicious start for my gardening career. The pumpkins grew large, sprawling out on wayward vines, but their tendency to take up residence in a little-used laneway was their undoing, and my brother ran over them with a tractor.

This year we unintentionally grew pumpkins and had a much greater degree of success. We nearly always have some sort of mystery vine that volunteers, but this is the first time it's turned out to be pumpkins. They did an impressive job of taking over a large area of the lawn where presumably a farmer squirrel had deposited the seed the previous fall. 

I can't claim that it was the most sincere pumpkin patch, and of course since we've had frost it's no longer extant and eligible to be visited by the Great Pumpkin in any case. Having grown them, we now question how Linus could spend any time sitting in a pumpkin patch, because those vines are very scratchy.

Our main question was whether these were eating pumpkins or ones best left for decor. They aren't the really large jack-o-lantern shape, but they aren't the cute pie kind either. We roasted a small one yesterday as a test and the flesh turned out to be suitably mashable just with a fork and not particularly stringy, so I think you'll be seeing a lot more pumpkin recipes soon.

 We opted for this soup recipe for lunch to use up our first small pumpkin.  

Oktoberfest pizza

 

Pizza Lucé teamed with Kramarczuck’s for a special Oktoberfest style pizza. We happened across it on one of those nights where you start out thinking you’re actually going to get to go out for a walk after work like you planned, but then someone encountered a problem just after you should be done for the day. So then the mental bargaining begins, and you pass through the denial stages where you think maybe a short walk and stop at the pizza place down the hill since it’s getting late. And then you’re three hours into trying to help someone and you ask if it’s OK to order pizza. But otherwise we probably wouldn’t have got to sample this one. Which of course we then tried to reverse engineer because it was only offered during their Oktoberfest celebration.

The Krautwürst
Inspiration: Pizza Lucé
Note: For quick pickled onions, you could follow the instructions in this recipe, or try the recipe below.

Ingredients
Pizza crust (either prebaked like a Boboli or dough for one pie)
½ tablespoon olive oil
¼ teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons coarse grainy mustard
¾ cup grated muenster cheese
⅓ cup well-drained sauerkraut
¼ pound smoked knackwurst, sliced ¼-inch thick (1 link)
2 ounces bratwurst, sliced ¼-inch thick (1 link)
½ grated mozzarella
2 tablespoons pickled red onions (see recipe)
1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley

Method
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. If using a pizza stone, place in oven while preheating.

Place a prebaked crust on a pizza pan, or form pizza dough into a round on a peel sprinkled with cornmeal. Combine olive oil, garlic powder and mustard. Spread over crust/dough. Top with muenster cheese, followed by sauerkraut, sausages and then topped with mozzarella. Place pan in oven or slide pizza onto baking stone. Bake for 12 minutes for a prebaked crust (or 15-20 minutes for an unbaked crust) or until pizza is golden. Remove from heat and served topped with pickled red onions and parsley.

Rating: Again, not really an approximation of the original pizza. Again, not really caring, because this one works for me. Both of them taste mostly of Kramarczuck’s smoked knackwurst and pickled onions, and both are plenty tasty if you like something that tastes kind of a like a really good sausage roll in pizza form. And boy, is Kramarczuck's crammed on a Saturday mid-morning these days. Glad to see they're busy, but vowing to get going earlier in the morning next time.

Quick-pickled red onions
From “Picture Perfect Parties” by Annette Joseph

Ingredients
1½ cups red wine vinegar
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 to 5 whole cloves
1 large red onion, cut into ¼-thick slices

Method
In a medium saucepan over medium heat, combine vinegar, sugar, salt and cloves. Simmer for 2 minutes. Add onion and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let onion cool. Transfer to a jar for longer term storage in the refrigerator.

Feel free to mix up the spice to your liking. Fennel, caraway or celery seed would be viable alternatives. 

This was the inspiration pizza.

Here's where we landed. This one mixes bockwurst and knackwurst.

Slow cooker vegetable lentil soup

 

Slow-cooker lentil soup with crispy tortillas
From “It’s All About Dinner: Easy, Everyday Family-Friendly Meals” by Nicky Corbishley, as published in the Star Tribune Sunday Supper column

Ingredients
1 onion, peeled and diced
1 red bell pepper, seeded and diced
3 carrots, peeled and chopped into small pieces
2 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped into small pieces
½ cup red lentils
3 cups stock
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
2 cups of baby spinach leaves (packed)
¾ cup grated Cheddar
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ teaspoon garlic salt
½ teaspoon dried parsley or cilantro
1 large tortilla

Method
In a large crock pot, combine onion, bell pepper, carrots, potatoes, lentils, stock, salt and pepper. Cover and cook on low for 6 hours or on high for 4 hours. Stir in spinach and cheddar shortly before serving to wilt spinach and melt cheese.

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine olive oil, garlic salt and herbs. Brush over tortilla. Cut into long thin strips and place on baking sheet. Bake for 5 to 7 minutes until crisp. Let cool. Serve soup topped with tortilla crisps, if desired.

Rating: My first thought was “actually not bad.” That might not seem like high praise, but my expectations had kind of sunk while it cooked because there wasn’t really any spice or herbage going on outside of the homemade broth, and unlike some slow-cooking soups that drive you crazy with hunger because of the aroma all day, this one didn’t seem to smell like much of anything. But it was indeed a reasonably tasty soup that was nice to have at the end of a long day, and fairly fast to mix up. The lentils more or less dissolve into creamy texture so the main thing you notice is the potatoes.

Now, about that garnish treatment. Some people believe that all soups deserve a good garnish. My opinion is that a good soup does not require one, and in this case the called-for garnish was not only uncalled for, it was actively not what was called for if one wanted to garnish this particular soup. The tortilla texture seemed like piling starch on starch, so I would suggest a sprinkling of more cheese or a thin chiffonade of spinach leaves if you are one of those people who require lily gilding. (I'll note that the photo that appeared in the paper showed it clearly had been garnished with some grated Parmesan as well.)

That said, the remaining tortilla crisps worked fine as a topping on a chop salad, so they have their uses.

Whether this soup qualifies as kid friendly would depend entirely on your kid. I suspect as a kid I would have looked at it pretty skeptically, but perhaps children are more adventurous these days. The recipe says it serves 3 to 4. If you’re serving much of anything with it like a salad and some bread, 4 is realistic. It reheats fine.

Caramelized onion, cherry tomato and goat cheese tart; cherry tomato and tapenade tart with mascarpone

 This is a good way to use up some of the bowls of tiny tomatoes in late summer. Or early fall. Like when you bring in the last blast ahead of frost. And then it snows (????!) before the Ides of October.

Caramelized onion, tomato and goat cheese tart
Adapted from “The Savory Baker by America’s Test Kitchen as published in the Star Tribune Sunday Supper. It included a somewhat unusual method for caramelizing onions. Since I was making this to take to a gathering with friends, I decided this wasn’t the time to fool around and find out, so I opted for the lengthy but reliable method. Two hours later, really wishing I’d planned far enough ahead that I could have done the crockpot method. (Evangelizing on this method again.) Note that onions cook way, way down, so for a half cup of onions you’re probably going to want to start with 1½ pounds or more.  You can always freeze the extras. Or do what I did, and try the recipe again with the other half of the puff pastry box.

Ingredients
½ cup caramelized onions
1 sheet puff pastry, thawed
6 ounces cherry tomatoes, halved
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves plus sprigs for garnish
½ cup (2 ounces) goat cheese, crumbled

Method
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line baking sheet with parchment paper. On a very lightly floured board, roll out puff pastry to a 10-inch square. Brush outer ½ inch of pastry with water and then fold toward center, pressing to seal.

Spread caramelized onions over the area within the pastry border. Top with halved tomatoes. Sprinkle with thyme leaves. Tuck crumbled goat cheese in between the tomatoes. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake until puffed and golden, about 24 minutes.

The recipe called for slicing it into four pieces to serve 4. I sliced it into 9 since I was counting it as an appetizer. You’d probably want to make two of these if you wanted to serve this as a main course to 4 people.

Rating: Best served warm, which we did the second time we made it. Fine enough at room temperature if you’re offering as a buffet appetizer, but really good when consumed immediately out of the oven. Truly hard to go wrong with this combo pack, and it looks pretty, too, especially with multiple colors of tomatoes. If you have lemon thyme, that’s a really nice addition. I'll definitely give this a spot in the summer recipe rotation. 

This batch got a little over brown; the recipe below reflects dialed-back suggested baking times.

We also tried this recipe with more of the little tomato excess. Actually, it's not really truly possible to have an excess of tomatoes in my opinion.It's not like zucchini.Or kale.

Tomato and tapenade tarts
From “The Cook’s Encyclopedia of Four Ingredient Cooking” by Joanna Farrow

Ingredients
1 sheet puff pastry, thawed
4 tablespoons olive tapenade, divided
1 ½ pounds cherry tomatoes, halved unless very small
½ cup mascarpone cheese

Method
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.

Roll out pastry and cut into 4 squares, or in 6-inch circles using a plate as a guide if you want to be fancy. Transfer to baking sheet. Score ½ inch from the edge with a sharp knife to make a rim.

Spread ½ tablespoon tapenade on each tart, making sure to keep it off the edges. Top with tomatoes, keeping them within the rim. Sprinkle with sea salt. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until puffed and golden. Remove from oven. Dot with remaining tapenade and put a dollop of mascarpone in the middle of each tart. Season with pepper and bake another 10 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Rating: It wasn't bad, but I really thought I'd like it a lot more than I actually did. We used purchased tapenade, and it's possible it didn't bring as much to the party as some do. It's a pretty fast fix, so I won't rule out making it again when I have my own tapenade made fresh. And when there are tomatoes back on the vines again. It's little green tomato time on the counters again. Oh, fall.