Vanessa Barrington

Magic Pumpkins: Pumpkin Pie and Pumpkin Cream Cheese Bread

I bought one of Annabelle’s magic white pumpkins on her recommendation. She said they were the best for pie. I always believe her. Even though I never make pumpkin pie (I always have the Thanksgiving guests bring it so I can concentrate on the savories) I thought I might as well give it a whirl.

I cut into it and I couldn’t believe the otherworldly day-glo quality of the flesh. And the beautiful line of pale green between white and orange. I couldn’t stop gazing. But into the oven it went in a glass casserole dish with a half-inch of water, covered in foil. I baked it until soft (about 30 minutes). It looked stringy but I scooped it into the food processor and gave it a whirl and it became a flawlessly smooth puree.

 
Then I made pie from the Jimtown Store Cookbook. It’s a wonderfully robust pie, not at all insipid. Filled with dark brown sugar, molasses and spices, including black pepper. Fantastic!

Then I froze some of the puree until this week and decided to make pumpkin bread. I’ve never made pumpkin bread before either, but I’ve eaten a lot of it. I like the kind with a cream cheese layer, so I Iooked around for recipes and found this one. But I wanted the quality of my bread to be robust, like the pie, so I made the recipe my own by adding more spices, molasses, dark brown sugar and a pecan streusel on top. It turned out great.

Here’s my version:

Pumpkin Bread:

1 cup pecans

1 cup butter , plus more for pans

3 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Pinch of allspice

A few grindings of black pepper

4 large eggs

1 1/4 cups granulated sugar

1 cup dark brown sugar, lightly packed (divided)

1 1/2 cups pumpkin puree

1 tablespoon molasses

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract


Cream Cheese Filling:

8 ounces package cream cheese

1/2 cup granulated white sugar

2 large eggs

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

2 tablespoons all purpose flour


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and toast the pecans for 5 minutes. Set aside to cool. Meanwhile, melt the butter and set it aside to cool. Butter and lightly flour two  9 x 5 x 3 inch loaf pans. Set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and black pepper. Set aside.

In another large bowl, whisk the eggs until lightly beaten. Add the granulated sugar, 3/4 cup of the brown sugar, and melted butter and whisk until blended.  Whisk or stir in the pumpkin puree, molasses, and vanilla extract.

Make the cream cheese filling:
In a food processor, process the cream cheese until smooth, add the sugar and process until blended and smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, processing just until incorporated, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula.  Add the flour and vanilla extract and process briefly.

Add the flour/spice mixture to the pumpkin mixture and stir just until the ingredients are combined, without overmixing.

Put one-quarter of the pumpkin batter into the two loaf pans, spreading it evenly. Top each one with one-half of the cream cheese filling.  Top the cream cheese with the remaining pumpkin batter.

Chop the nuts coarsely and toss with the remaining 1/4 cup brown sugar. Sprinkle evenly over the top of each loaf pan.

Bake the breads for about 60-80 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.

Place pans on a wire rack and let cool for about 10 minutes before removing breads.

Give one away and keep one! Or freeze one.

Hunger Challenge Day Two

I wake up ready to go. Day one wasn’t so bad. I’m working at home in the morning and going into the office late. I take that time to make Vietnamese rice porridge. This is a brilliant dish involving a very small amount of white, long grain rice, a lot of chicken broth, a few coins of ginger, and two green onions. So few ingredients to make a magical dish that is intensely satisfying. It’s like alchemy with rice. I learned this dish from Andrea Nguyen’s Book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.
It’s one of my favorite cookbooks and I’m deeply appreciative that I have the time to make this at home before heading off to work.

Breakfast:
Oatmeal with a little brown sugar and milk; 2 slices of melon

I’m noticing that I’m eating my breakfast with great concentration. Seems I’ve banished mindless eating in one day.

Lunch:
A bowl of the above porridge with a little cilantro and sliced green onion. I also threw in just a bit of the shredded chicken I’d cooked a few days before.

I was really hungry after work so I had a piece of bread with peanut butter and went off to yoga class. I felt a bit weak during the class and came home famished and ready to throw together a quick rice noodle pasta dish.

Dinner: I used half the bok choy that I bought for $1 and some rice noodles from my Food Bank pantry list. In addition, I sauteéd the other half of the onion from the soup broth, a bit of ginger, and a bit of garlic. I also used just a few shreds of chicken and some soy sauce from the pantry. I garnished the pasta with cilantro and green onion (I’m now thinking these two items are some of my smartest purchases).

I notice that I’m taking no pleasure in cooking. I just want to get it done and into my mouth. I usually take my time and listen to music and relax. I just want to eat. I find this interesting. I eat really fast and somewhat resentfully. I realize that I’m only about 80% full. Funny, this is a habit I’d been trying to master and finally I’m doing it. There's a bottle of wine in the house so I decide to have a glass. My cushion right? I'm also drinking one cup of coffee a day. I tell myself my cushion allows that too and it actually does, depending on what else I need the cushion for.

I’m hungry again before bed so I have a piece of toast with butter.

Recalibration Eating

Let’s just say I’m not the “cleansing type.” I like to think of myself as a self-indulgent healthy eater. I don’t deny myself anything I want (though I never want to eat fast food or most processed food) and eat a great variety of mostly very healthy stuff. But after a months-long period of intense work and stress I was feeling a little unbalanced and suffering from spring allergies well into the summer.

Not one to do anything drastic like ingest nothing but lemon juice and maple syrup for days on end, I decided to figure out a way to eat for a week that I thought would make me feel better.

Mostly by instinct, I came up with a recalibration diet. Luckily my cohort was game too or it would have been more difficult. We even went out once. To Café Gratitude, natch.

Here’s what we ate/didn’t eat:

Any whole grains and legumes we wanted (except wheat)
All the fresh fruits and vegetables we could eat
A good balance of raw vegetables to cooked with some fermented vegetables
No bread or anything, not completely whole (except almond milk I made myself)
No alcohol, dairy, or animal products of any kind (except bonito flakes for dashi broth)
No sugar
1 cup of coffee a day

 

(soba noodles in dashi broth)

Meal Plan:
Breakfast: We alternated three items: whole grain porridge (pictured above) with fresh fruit, almond milk and honey; dashi broth, soba noodles, seaweed, and mushrooms; and fruit smoothies made with homemade almond milk

Lunch: We alternated beans and brown rice and seasonal vegetables with lentils, brown rice and seasonal vegetables. Some raw, some cooked, sometimes drizzled with tahini dressing. Sauteed okra, steamed greens, raw carrots, lacto-fermented beets, and avocado, etc.

Dinner: Same as above

Snack: lots of peaches anytime we wanted them

(my own dal, with cucumber relish from the book, and leftover curry red rice bowl from Cafe Gratitude)
It was interesting to see what kind of cravings came up on such a diet. As I said I don’t deny myself anything I want so I was bound to yearn for something. I thought it might be the yogurt I eat almost every day. Nope. Or the wine I love with dinner. Nope. Or the afternoon nubbin of chocolate or scoop of ice cream. Nope. Or the cheese I love dearly. Nope. Here’s what I wanted most intensely: Bread and Eggs. I craved eggs like crazy and realized how often, when I’m hungry, I’ll reach for a piece of bread or make toast or something. The carbs I think are a habit and the eggs maybe a need for animal protein. It was interesting. And on the last day I started daydreaming about pizza. And that’s how I broke the cleanse, with pizza from Flour & Water. It was fantastic!

(blurry, but I could live on raw carrots, lacto-fermented beets, and mashed avocado with salt)

Do I feel better? Yes, a bit lighter, more energetic. Most importantly, I think limiting the insane number of food choices we have every day is a really good way to start eating mindfully again and enjoy everything even more intensely (I say this as I eat breakfast at the computer while blogging). The whole experiment was sort of comforting, fun, and predictable (in a good way). I felt like I had more headspace for other thoughts besides food. I looked forward to every meal because I was really hungry and because it was tasty food. I think it’s a good idea for me to do this every few months or so.

(ugly-tasty-dal over brown rice, steamed greens and roots with tahini dressing and turnip-kohlrabi pickles from the book)

Was it hard? Not for the most part, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t absolutely tortuous to stop by Omnivore Books to see our friend Celia moments before the Fried Chicken Taste Off . One of the succulent, fragrant entries had already arrived and the aroma was driving me wild. Then I had to torture myself further by looking at cookbooks!

Scenes from a Photo Shoot

Toast shot

Ok, so the book is pretty much done. All that remains is copyediting, galleys, and other little details. Directly on the heels of turning in the manuscript, we went right into shooting the photos.

We did it with a crew of 4 plus me over 5 long days right here at the house. It was fun, intense, and a very exhausting. Kind of like catering a 5 day party.

But it paid off and we got some gorgeous shots. Here's a little photo essay of mine documenting a few of the moments. These, of course, are not Sara Remington's photos but mine on my little Sony Cyber-shot. But my photos do benefit from the food and prop styling of Nani Steele and Kami Bremyer respectively. Props also go to Sara (of course) and Stacy Ventura, fab photo assistant. Thanks Ladies! While I'm thanking. Thanks also to Emunah, Rachel, Haven, and Susan for all your help during the shoot and to all the parents and kids who modeled at the picnic. You know who you are.
Sourdough Buckwheat Pancakes with Caramelized Apples

Donut Run from Dynamo Donuts. Oh Yeah!

Tofu Soup with Homemade Kimchi

Kami with Root Beer Day 5

Sustainable Seafood Stew with Meyer Lemon Parsley Aioli (not pictured)

Sara and Nani valiantly trying to make brown cookies with browner filling look appetizing

Let's celebrate! It's a wrap!

Indonesianish Fried Rice

Between seasonal, from the market, no recipe cooking, recipe development projects, and $1 a meal Hunger Challenge recipes, I’ve been slowly working my way through James Oseland’s wonderful book, Cradle of Flavor.

Awhile ago I made one of the many sambals in the book, Javanese Sambal. It consists of dried shrimp paste, lots of shallots, garlic, red chiles, and palm sugar. It’s a cooked sambal, so it’s fiery, but mellow. It seems to go with everything and lasts forever. The day I made it we ate it with rice and steamed fish, but there was a lot left and it keeps finding its way to the table as a condiment.

This was a quick breakfast of leftover, lovely, and local Massa Organic Brown Rice, and a fried egg. I tossed in the sambal, and stirred in the Indonesian soy sauce (pictured), then topped it all off with a fried egg, a few leaves of cilantro, and some cool cucumber slices. Memorable. If I were you, I’d buy this book. You can’t find food this good and authentic-tasting in any restaurants I know.

Photo Credits: Susan Fleming

Something to Relish

I'm rarely compelled to blog about a product, but here's an exception. I found this at The Pasta Shop in Berkeley just as they were building the new display. They found it at the Unfancy Food Show in Brooklyn. I was smitten by the packaging first and that's about as far as it would have gone if the nice man hadn't offered me a taste. (they make beautiful pickles too but at a higher price point). As it was, $6.99 was my gateway to a brand new addiction. The brothers McClure do indeed know what they are doing, which puts me in a pickle because now I need to figure out how to make my own version. How hard can it be? cucumbers, vinegar, water, salt, peppers (jalapenos?), garlic, dill. I think it will take awhile before I can make such a perfect relish, but I'm going to try.

And what have we adorned with this lovely little relish? Crazy sounding, but we put it on salami pizza. It works to cut the richness in the same way that pepperoncini works on a salami sandwich. What other plans do we have? Lots! Hot dogs, sausages, chicken salad and tuna salad sandwiches, bowls of pinto beans, tacos, pulled pork sandwiches. I don't know. It kind of sounds like I'm going to have to up my meat consumption temporarily or think of some vegetarian ideas. Send yours along please. 'Scuse me, I've got to go buy some Mc Clure's pickles now.

Artichoke Risotto “Hash” with Sunny-side up Eggs

I love thinking of ways to use dinner leftovers for breakfast—specifically one-skillet dishes that can be whipped up in the time it takes the coffee to drip.

The artichoke risotto was basic. Just a simple version with the hearts from medium-sized artichokes purchased at the market (braised ahead and then tossed in at the end). I used the braising liquid with some chicken broth for the cooking broth and added a little saffron (not enough!) and Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Next day, I fashioned loose cakes from the risotto, tossed them into the non-stick over medium heat. Flipped and pressed with the spatula a few times like I was making hash browns. Once the risotto was a little brown, I added small pats of butter to the spaces between the cakes and filled them with two pastured eggs. Salt and pepper, and a little lid action to set the whites and we were eating in no time. It was good enough to warrant making extra risotto just for the leftovers.