Whole Wheat Pumpkin Pancakes

Ah, bright and sunny southern California. Erik and I spent the weekend visiting the fam in San Diego, which was... well, it was gloomy and grey all weekend. SO, the apple-picking fell through, but there was plenty of beer and delicious food to make up for it. Most of it fried and cheesy, just how vacation food should be.

The good thing about dreary, drizzly weekends is that they give you a foolproof excuse for a lazy Sunday morning brunch (essential after a long Saturday night). The snuggly-sweater weather and my cousin's adorable kitchen were the perfect opportunity to try out a quintessential fall breakfast recipe I've been sitting on (not literally): pumpkin pancakes.

No adventures this time around, though, as canned pumpkin is much more readily available in San Diego than in Leesiana. This recipe is quick and easy, ideal for feeding a hungry (hungover) crowd.

Screw you, real pumpkins.

Nope, no adventures, just a hearty, perfectly sweet breakfast, best eaten with friends and family
(Mostly because pancakes don't keep well, so I didn't feel the urge to hide them for later. Other things I prefer to cook alone, so I can ration it out and stash some just for me! See last week's recipe for an example).

Made with whole-wheat flour, these guys are like a normal pancake's outgoing older brother: less light and fluffy, more substantial and bursting with flavor. They're not too heavy, though, and the autumn spices still let the pumpkin shine through. I'm a firm believer that you can tell how delicious something will be by how close everyone stays to the kitchen, and my crowd was parked right in front of the stove. Apparently no one was disappointed, because these things disappeared almost as quickly as they could be flipped from the pan to the plates.

Cheesy Onion and Potato Tart

Picture this: I'm at the library to pick up a cookbook written by a local author. The librarian (who has some kind of vaguely British accent, which always makes someone's opinions seem more legit) tells me that she didn't find much she could use from that book, and she recommends this one, instead:

It doesn't have any pictures, so I would normally pass it right by. I guess I'm still a picture book kind of girl.

BUT, if there's one thing librarians know, it's books. So I take it home, look it over, and fall in love a little. It has fairly simple recipes that are chock full of seasonal produce and beautifully-written, appetizing descriptions. Plus, it's based on Italian recipes, so almost every recipe, from breakfast to dessert, involves some kind of cheese. That's my kind of cooking.

I tweaked the onion tart recipe a bit to make it reminiscent of a Spanish tortilla, with the addition of thinly sliced red potatoes. Be careful to keep the heat pretty low as you sauté the onions and potatoes: you want them soft, but not browned or crispy. If they do crisp, though, don't worry. It will still be delicious, just in a different way.

With a touch of sweetness from the onion and the bright flavor of fresh basil, this tart is ooey-gooey comfort food served warm, but it's just as delicious room temperature the next morning. It's substantial and filling but not too heavy, and the richness of the cheeses nudges it into the realm of decadence. Seriously, this is really good stuff. Like, have a piece for dinner, another for breakfast, and hide another to save for lunch good. 

My ricotta involved goats.
Yours doesn't have to.

It's busy-weeknight easy, too. The ingredients come together in a flash, and then you're free to (fill in your chores of choice) while it hangs out in the oven for an hour.

Pumpkin Butter and Sweet Potato Wedges

We're finally having a bit of fall weather here. Fall means so many exciting things! Jeans and jackets and not feeling like an obese, asthmatic 90-year-old when I run!

It also means a whole new lineup of delicious ingredients are appropriate. I love berries and tomatoes, but I am ready for a change. I had a couple friends over and went a little nuts with the fall-themed cooking this weekend. I made last week's soup again (sans okra. Erik rebelled against "the weird wheels."). I also fell in love with a butternut squash at the farmer's market, and I got it back home before I realized I didn't know what to do with it.

After consulting the Internet and The Flavor Bible (which is amazing, by the way), I made a baked butternut squash dessert with a layer of crunchy, almost-burned brown sugar on top. Add a dollop of cinnamon-vanilla whipped cream, and you have the perfect fall dessert. Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a rush cooking, so I didn't measure anything or take any pictures. I promise to make it again and get it on here!

Butternut is the most metal of the squashes.

I didn't forget you, though: I was hoping the jelly lady at the market would have apple butter. No such luck, but she did have pumpkin butter. I tried it. It was amazing. I had to have it in my life. It was also six dollars, and I had exactly four left in my wallet.

Vegetable and Rice Soup

I kicked off this weekend's adventures with a trip to the farmer's market. I've been meaning to go for weeks now. I finally saw Food Inc. this week, and apparently that was all the motivation I needed. Great film, by the way, as are the books by both authors featured. Full disclosure, though: I did eat a bowl of Smacks during the movie. Apparently, it was convincing enough to get me up at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, but not enough to keep me from eating things with 40+ ingredients.

Embarassing.

Back to my market trip: I managed to resist the temptation of the crazy juices, donuts, bagels, and homemade pastries (are we sure that organic cream puffs aren't good for me? Really sure?) and mostly stick to my list. I made it back to my car loaded down with fresh eggs, tons of herbs that I will try my hardest not to kill, plenty of delicious things to dip in hummus, and grass-fed beef.

In celebration of delicious things, lunch was maybe the most amazing poached egg I've ever had, soaked up by a crusty piece of bread and topped with fresh rosemary. Dinner was the first burger I've had in a couple years (I think), on a flaky roll and topped with orange-dyed cheese that comes individually wrapped and somehow melts before any contact with heat. Things like this find their way home when you live with boys. The beef, though, was delicious.

I had planned to share my favorite recipe for pizza dough, but the vegetables and densely seeded homemade bread I came home with were just begging to become a pot of soup (with, um, bread. Which does not go in the soup.).

How could this not turn out well?
You see the garlic, right?

This soup is my go-to guy for any number of occasions: when it's cold out, when I accidentally buy way more vegetables that we'll normally eat, when I realize that the boy hasn't eaten anything green in a week. I've been making it for so long that it was weird to go back and look at the original recipe. No oregano? That's sometimes the only spice I add! What do you mean a small zucchini, I usually add two! I actually made this soup with beet greens instead of spinach once and ended up with a bright purple concoction. It was delicious, but I couldn't convince anyone else to try it. I think there's still some of that batch in my freezer.

Orange-Vanilla Spiced Applesauce

I  hate that everything you buy at the grocery has tons of sugar added. Drives me nuts. It means I have to wash the sugar coating off dried cranberries before I use them, and it leads me to do things like stand in a crowded condiment aisle, muttering angrily to myself about how I guess I'll have to learn to make my OWN damn ketchup.

This is misleading

And this no-sugar added nonsense is no better. Calorie free marshmallow topping? Not natural. Full disclosure: I eat dessert every single day. Sometimes I literally eat dessert for dinner (seems efficient, no?). I cook with things like cream, butter, and chocolate, and I shamelessly lick beaters without even scraping them first. But. I do not like for my desserts to masquerade as health food. It's confusing, and it creeps me out. Similarly, no matter how hard woman's  magazines insist that it's true, apple slices do not quell cravings for chocolate ice cream . Let's just accept that dessert and health foods are two separate things (frozen bananas are a different story, but we'll come back to that another day).

Can we be friends? Maybe without Katie bitching about it?