Cooking: JiliK's Pork, Onion and Apple Stuffing

With Christmas now an inevitability, I'll shortly be whipping up another batch of the stuffing I've been perfecting over the last few years, ever since I overthrew the stodgy bread and onion stuffing that had been a mainstay at our family's Christmas dinner since the 90's. This is a much more flavoursome, meaty and moist stuffing, one that tastes great cooked separate from the turkey, which is a huge bonus because goodness knows, there's no way I'm getting elbow deep into that thing. :D

Here's what you'll need:

• 5 large onions
• 5 bramley apples
• 5 large sticks of celery
• 700g pork sausage meat
• 550g breadcrumbs approx.
• A handful each of fresh parsley, rosemary, thyme and sage OR 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons dried mixed herbs
• 5 tablespoons butter
• salt
• freshly ground black pepper

Sorry about the quality of some of these photos. These are all basically spy pics snuggled out of the kitchen while nobody was looking. With it being Christmas, there are inevitably family members hovering around any time I'm making this - ones whose very minds would shattered by the concept someone hunching over food, carefully taking pictures to post on the internet. :D

1. So, first up, dice your onions and celery, making sure to top and tail everything and to peel the skin, and  any tough outer layers off the onions. You don't have to dice these super finely. Not where this recipe is headed anyway.

2. Next, take a generous chunk of butter and melt it in your pan. I'm using pure, salted butter here (the kind you get in 1lb/454g blocks, at least in in Ireland), probably about 2 tablespoons (hey, I never said this would be healthy :D). Any type of butter (or oil) should do the job okay though, but you'll probably need to add some more salt later.



3. Add your diced onions and celery to the pan and soften them over a low to medium heat, stirring regularly. You don't want them to get burned, or even browned if you can avoid it, just soft.

4. Once your veggies are soft, take them out of the pan and set them aside for the moment

5. Next, peel and dice up the apples. Add another 2 tablespoons of butter or so to the pan and let it melt.; then add the apples. Again, cook them over a low to medium heat until they're soft, stirring regularly.

 Pre-chopped. I'm using my own herbs from the garden here. The sage (bottom) I've actually had in the freezer since the summer. Come December, sage leaves are hard to come by but I find this is an okay workaround.

6. If you're using fresh herbs, before you take the apples out, chop up your herbs finely, stripping the rosemary and thyme from their stems before you start. Then add them to the pan with the apples and let them cook for a couple of minutes, stirring constantly.

7. Take your apples out of the pan and set them aside for the moment. Now, add another well, let's say tablespoon of butter this time (the sausage meat will be fatty already so you won't need as much), let that melt and add the sausage meat to the pan.

Tee he!

8. Cook the sausage meat through over a low to medium heat once again, stirring more regularly this time because it'll burn faster than either than the apples or veg.

9. When the sausage meat is cooked, take it out of the pan and set it aside too. It's time to bring everything together...

Cooking: Fruit Scones & Buttermilk Pudding

Now that I think about it, it was this great scone I had in a coffee shop about a year ago that kicked it off: a quest spanning several months to find a really good, reliable fruit scone recipe on the internet. After a few decent but unremarkable batches, I finally tried out this one by Mary Berry. I did make a little modification, replacing the sultanas with the same weight of mixed fruit, including cherries, raisins, sultanas and mixed peel. The resulting scones were fully legit; soft, sweet and with a slight crunchy outside crust. Finally, the recipe I'd been looking for. I've made a ton of these since, usually making a big batch so I can use up a full 1 litre bottle of buttermilk and freezing most of them, and they freeze pretty well too.



Though I did also found a good recipe for using up a lot of excess buttermilk if you've got it hanging around afterwards. What you see above is a buttermilk pudding. A traditional South African desert, apparently, I found a recipe for it here. As it says on the site, the measurements are a bit strange, but the pudding is quite good. It's not too far off from a sponge cake in terms of texture and flavour, though it's a little denser. I found it significantly easier to make than sponge cake though, which has always turned out gritty and flat any time I've attempted it. The pudding above I threw a bunch of leftover lemon syrup over while it was hot , giving it a nice lemony flavour too.

Cooking: Butternut Squash Pie

Being a little tired of soup, I thought I'd try something different different with a butternut squash I found myself with in November. Having established that butternut squash pie was indeed a thing, I set about rounding up the necessary ingredients, only to find that I was all out of condensed milk. A key component, but I was far too deep into the pie-making process to quit at this stage. Queue a desperate scramble to find a alternative recipe, which lead me to this one here.

I was a bit unsure how things would go, with this new recipe calling for about a cup more more butternut squash than I had, and tension levels reached critical when it yielded considerably more, and considerably thinner filing than I've ever dealt with before.



In the end though, the pie turned out well. Quite similar to pumpkin pie as you'd expect, but a little sweeter, and a little lighter; both in terms of flavour, and consistency. The former though, I'd chalk up to the shortage of butternut squash. Another cooking disaster averted.

Shoddy-ass latticework aside. :)

Cooking: Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato Soup

Checking the date on the photo above, I've had the ingredients for this soup scrawled down for almost a year now. With the method fresh again in my mind after making a new batch tonight, it seems like a good time to finally write this one up.

I'm not sure why our small, local supermarket started stocking sweet potatoes and butternut squashes a couple of years ago - I'm pretty sure I'm one of the only two or three people who buys them, but having picked them up, I was determined to make them into soup for some reason (personally, I blame the weird abundance of pumpkin soup in Zelda). After a good few attempts, this is the one I settled on. It's a hearty, lightly spicy soup that strikes a nice balance between sweet and savoury.

(If I do say so myself. :D)

Ingredients

• 1 butternut squash
• 3 large sweet potatoes
• 2 medium onions
• 4 medium sticks of celery
• 2 1/4 pints stock
• dried coriander
• mild chilli powder
• ground sea salt
• ground black pepper
• extra virgin olive oil

Method

1. Peel the sweet potatoes and peel and remove the seeds from the the butternut squash.
2. Cut both into 0.5-1 inch cubes and spread them out evenly in a large, flat oven pan, on top of a piece of greaseproof paper or parchment.
3. Give the diced veg a generous sprinkling of olive oil followed by a good, even sprinkling of the coriander and mild chilli powder, and a few grinds of salt and pepper.
4. Toss the veg around gently to make sure everything gets a good coating of seasoning. (I use a big serving spoon for this)
5. Put the the diced veg. cooking in the oven at about 200ºC.
6. Meanwhile, peel the onions and the backs of the celery stalks (to remove the stringy bits). Dice the onions and celery pretty finely and sweat them in some more olive oil in a large pot.
7. When the butternut squash and sweet potato pieces are soft enough to stick a fork through easily add them to the pot with the sweated onions.
8. Now if you've got a decent hand blender here's where you'd mix everything in the pot together and blend the mixture into a smooth mash. Failing that, as long as you've diced the onions and celery finely enough, you can totally get away with just mashing everything thoroughly with a potato masher here.
9. Next, pour in the stock and stir well to mix it together with the mashed veg. I usually just use chicken stock cubes and 2 1/4 pints is three stock cubes worth of Knorr's finest.
10. Now bring the soup to the boil, giving it the occasional stir.
11. Once it's boiling, reduce the heat and let it simmer it for 15-20 minutes, stirring it regularly. While it's simmering, give it a taste. It's probably going to need more seasoning, so add more salt, pepper and spices as needed and give it a good stir to mix them in.
12. If you want to thicken up the soup you can dissolve a few tablespoons of flour in some water and add it here. Make sure to dissolve the flour in the water thoroughly first though and to stir the soup continuously until the flour-water mixture dissolves in it completely. Otherwise you're going to end up with little balls of flour floating in the soup.
13. Enjoy! (Hopefully :D)

Cooking: Cheese and Onion Soup with Cheese Bread

Having had a disgusting block of rubbery, Jameson-flavoured cheddar in the fridge for about two weeks, I finally decided to do something about it tonight. I was thinking macaroni and cheese at first, but this thing was so rank there's no way that wouldn't have been equally vile. No, what I really needed was some way cut down its sickly sweet faux whiskey flavour, and I thought hiding it away in a cheese bread might just do the trick.

After a quick search I landed on this recipe, which proved nice and easy and used up the vast majority of the stuff. I did still have a bit left over though, so with my bread in the oven, I decided that I'd mix the rest of it with some regular cheddar and try making a cheese and onion soup to go with it.

Aside from replacing three quarters of the milk with stock (I though all milk would make a bit too rich), I went with this recipe for the soup. Well, until I decided it wouldn't yield much soup at all and that I'd double the amount of stock and milk going in. That, of course, meant I didn't have enough flour in there for it to thicken so I ended up having to add a couple of tablespoons more (dissolved in water) before I could add the cheese.

Despite the last-minute alterations, the resulting soup was delicious - nice and creamy, with a tasty, well-balanced flavour, with only a hint of faux Jameson nastiness. Success! The bread, despite containing the vast majority of the cheese had even less of it. To be honest it was a bit bland; ideally I think you'd need to much stronger-flavoured cheese in there than cheddar. I did enjoy the crispiness it leant the outside crust though, and hey, it was fucking edible, which is more than I can say for the stuff that was sitting in my fridge a couple of hours previously. :D

Cooking: Backlog Edition

I've been so busy over the last few months that I've got quite a backlog of posts to get through now, not to mention a big-ass box of candy. ;) Let's get things rolling with a couple of culinary adventures I never got around to posting from a few months ago.



Lemon Tart

When life handed me a lemons, that had previously been de-rinded for a cheesecake, I opted for a lemon cake rather than the obvious. After a little research though, it became apparent that it was the rind, rather than the juice that I needed to make a cake, so I decided on this lemon tart instead. I only had a carton of single cream at my disposal (one that turned out to be out of date on later inspection. Oops.), but everything turned out fine. The filling was nice and creamy, with a good lemoney flavour, and the crust was just right.



Tomato Soup

A month later, in early July, I made some tomato soup based on this recipe. I didn't stray too far from this recipe either, only adding a couple of red peppers and a bit of garlic that I wanted to use up, and replacing the fresh bay leaves with dried ones. The resulting soup was pretty great, much tastier than any tomato soup I had before from a tin or a packet and not at all over-sweet like most of those are. I'll definitely be making this one again.

Cooking: Carrot Cake, Avocado-Lime Pie

Carrot Cake

Soup wasn't the only initiative I was undertaking to use up the vast carrot surplus last year; I also tried my hand at making a carrot cake. Based on this recipe, the cake itself went pretty smoothly; though holy shit, does it take a long time to grate carrots. :D I couldn't get a regular-sized tub of cream cheese for the icing, so I ended up having to scoop the contents out of eight mini tubs of Philadelphia Light instead. That would have been fine, except the frosting turned out a bit on the runny side, which I suspect may be down to using reduced fat cream cheese instead of the regular stuff. Overall though, the cake was pretty great; rich, moist and great with the light, orangey frosting.



Avocado-Lime Pie

I randomly picked up a few avocados before Christmas and while looking around on Google for what to do with them, I came across a recipe for an avocado-lime pie, which sounded pretty good, and it was. Though, to be honest I'm not sure I could really taste the avocado in there at all. It pretty much just tasted like a regular key lime pie, which was more than fine by me. The last slice went down especially well with a cup of tea and Giant Bomb's Holiday Nostalgiafest to accompany it. :)

Cooking: Awesome Vegetable Soup

 

Back in December, with a garden full of deformed carrots to use up, I started experimenting with making soup. First I tried making this marrow and carrot soup with a marrow I had picked up on a whim while doing some shopping, half convinced that marrows were only a thing that existed within the confines of vegetable contests in rural ITV dramas. The soup was pretty good though, a bit too thick maybe, especially after leaving the leftovers in the fridge for a couple of days.

The next one was a carrot and orange soup that I made on the day before Christmas Eve, but the less said about that, the better. :D With a view to making better soup once all the holiday commotion had died down, I put aside a 1.25L container of the water the Christmas Ham had been boiled in. A week after Christmas, it was still in the kitchen, unrefrigerated on a worktop. Actually, right above the fridge. Honestly, some people just can't be bothered. :D

Never one to be put off by a potential case of food poisoning, I decided that the time had finally come for soup batch number 3. So I started off by cooking half a turnip and a couple of small potatoes that were lying around, as well as about four large carrots worth of deformed carrot runts in the ham stock, seasoning it with some salt and freshly-ground pepper. (Though that fucking pepper been hanging around here for fifteen years at least, so take that as you will, :D) Without a decent hand whisk, I had no choice when the vegetables were tender but to fish them out of the stock and pop them in a blender until they were smooth.

As I was blending them, I decided that while I was clearing out Christmas leftovers with this soup, I might as well chuck in the two bits of vegetable-type leftovers that were festering away at the bottom of the fridge, which were: a small container of cooked celeriac, made just the way Mr. Oliver likes it and another container of the thick marrow soup from, ooh two weeks ago then; into the blender they went. When the vegatable mixture was nice and smooth, I popped the blender contents back into the stock to simmer away for another little while. To that, I added four or so teaspoons of flour dissolved in cold water to thicken it a bit, taking care to keep stirring the soup while I added it, least any gooey flour-based balls form within. Thickened up nicely, my soup was ready to serve.

I grabbed a bowl of it, to accompany my egg mayonnaise roll up in the picture and settled down to watch some no doubt fine entertainment on the internet. Maybe it was just the salmonella taking hold, but holy crap, this soup was awesome, way better than the marrow soup itself, no doubt down to the fact that this one used some real stock as opposed to a couple of Knorr cubes. Whatever black magic made it this good, I enjoyed several bowls of it as the post-Christmas period petered out and it was almost enough to make me ignore the random power outages and constant unwanted house guests that it brought this year. Almost.

So basically that recipe is:

• 1.25 Litres ham stock
• 4 large carrots
• 1 small turnip / half a large turnip 
• 2 small potatoes
• cooked celeriac (ala Jamie Oliver) - roughly a 200ml container's worth
• about 400ml marrow and carrot soup
• about 4 teaspoons of flour, dissolved in cold water 
• salt and pepper to season

Is there anyone insane enough out there to follow this to a tee? Prove me wrong, Internet.

Cooking: Pecan Pie, Banoffee Pie

Pecan Pie

I've wanted to try pecan pie for ages and the only way that was ever going to happen over here was for me to make one myself. To that end, I've been on the look-out for a bag of shelled pecans for a while. The best I could come up with though was two 200g bags of pecans in shells, which proved to be absolute bastards to break out of those shells in one piece. I must have spent about an hour picking broken shell bits off the nuts inside, bit by bit, finishing up with a coating of a fine, red pecan dust all over my hands.

The pie itself, based on this recipe, was much smoother sailing. Though there were still a few small bits of shell perilously lurking within, the pecan-caramel combination was great, especially with some of the maple cream from the same recipe.



Banoffee Pie

Banoffee Pie is something else I've been meaning to make for ages. I was hopeful I could make one with a tin of evaporated milk, rather than condensed milk as I ended up with one lurking in the cupboard with no real use for it. Sure enough, after a bit of internet detective work, I came across this recipe posted on some mum-based forum. They weren't wrong about the toffee part, which probably took a good bit longer than 40 minutes for me, but it was indeed pretty damn "gorg". I did bump up the amount of digestives, bananas and cream in mine though, so I guess that helped (though certainly not in the waistline department. :D).

Boy, This Sure Would Have Been More Timley in November...

..., but why start breaking with tradition now? Happy St. Jack-'o-lantern's day, everyone!



Another completely unremarkable Jack-o'-lantern stares into the distance, pondering the nearby stack of dated audio visual equipment.



Still churning out pies from that leftover pumpkin flesh. This year I finally got around to picking up a couple of proper pie dishes just before Halloween. No more making do with cake tins or lasagne dishes.



Check out that sweet-ass latticework.



The day after Halloween I found myself in a supermarket clearing their Halloween decorations for half price; I knew what I had to do. And having bought them, I couldn't just let them sitting around until next year, so I ended up putting them up around the house and leaving them there for a week or so.

That's nothing though - the two Halloween candy dispensers on top of the shelves have been hanging around since 2007; The candy inside has seen better days.



This impressive display is brought to you by the power of six AA batteries and Sellotape, so much Sellotape.



And now, the all-internal jack-o'-lantern action you've been waiting for. Aww yeah!



Gross.

Cooking: Simnel Cake

Blimey, it's been a while since I did a cooking post, but cook I did over Easter as I attempted to bake a simnel cake - basically a fruit cake, with marzipan in the middle and on top of it. I was using this recipe (using marzipan in place of the almond paste), and things seemed to be going well at first. I even had eight Marzipan balls on top to represent Bowser and the seven Koopa Kids. (Those who accept Bowser Jr. are heathens.) Then I realised that you're not supposed to put on the top layer of marzipan until the cake's baked. Queue a pained effort to remove the top layer of marzipan from the sticky cake mixture. I just about managed it, damaging a good streak of it in the process and forcing me to flatten the marzipan balls to repair it.

The baking didn't go too smoothly either. The cake ended up being done more than an hour before the recipe said. I guess the fan-assisted oven might have been to blame. When I took it out, it was a little burned around the edges and pretty dried out towards the outside of the cake, especially on one side.

Despite a fairly dry outer layer though, the cake didn't turn out too bad. I'm not sure the marzipan added much (I'm sure the home-made almond paste would have been preferable), but the cake itself was a nice and rich, not too dissimilar to a traditional Christmas cake. Just the thing to have with a nice cup of tea as you come to the end of a Mass Effect 1 & 2 marathon, which is how I spent most of Easter.

Christmas Cooking: Christmas Pudding

So, this year I decided to try my hand at making a Christmas pudding. With a 13 minute cook time in a microwave, this recipe had "bad idea" written all over it, which only made it all the more intriguing to me. I made a few minor changes to the recipe, swapping apricots for dates and using golden syrup instead of treacle. I put it all in a microwavable bowl, covered it with cling film and cooked it as instructed.

While I was sure the cling film on top of the bowl was going to explode at one point, thankfully it didn't and the only problem in the end was that the centre of the pudding turned out kind of gooey. I remedied that by putting it back in the microwave for two minute spurts, checking it after each one. I think it took about three to get the middle of the pudding nice and firm.

The resulting pudding definitely had the consistency and texture of a Christmas pudding, but the taste was quite different to what I was used to; It was much more fruity, with the booze and spices taking a back seat to the citrus flavours. It was quite nice though and I'd certainly consider making this pudding again for next Christmas.

Christmas Cooking: Christmas Cake

It may be mid-January, but the Christmas spirit lives on here in the form of some stuff I meant to post over Christmas, but didn't. To kick off, here's there recipe I use every year to whip up a Christmas cake. To be more precise, it's actually just a porter cake with icing, but damn it, that's close enough.

Ingredients:

8oz Sugar
8oz Butter
1lb Self Raising Flour
1/2 Teaspoon Mixed Spice
1/2 Teaspoon Cinnamon
3 Eggs
1/2 Pint Porter
2lb Dried Fruit
2oz Ground Almonds

For Icing:
Strawberry Jam
1 Bag of Icing Sugar*
1 Pack Marzipan

*Plus whatever ingredients the icing recipe on the bag of icing sugar requires.

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugar (I'm sure there's a YouTube video on this :D)
2. Mix the spices together with the flour.
3. Beat the eggs.
4. Start adding the eggs alternatively with the flour to the mixture, once the eggs run out start adding the porter instead.
5. When all the eggs, flour and porter are added to the mix, add the ground almonds and fruit. I usually add a small carton of mixed peel, a small carton of glance cherries and make up the rest of the 2lb with a combination of raisins, sultanas, currants and dried cranberries.
6. Preheat your oven to 150C and transfer the mix to a 9 inch cake tin. I usually line the cake tin with cardboard (from a cardboard box) wrapped in greaseproof paper - a round disc of cardboard at the bottom and a strip along the side (a few inches higher than the tin). That may well be a fire hazard (Do it at your own risk!), but I find it makes it easier to remove the cake once it's done.
7. Start checking the cake once it's been cooking for 1 1/2 hours.
8. When it's done, the top of the cake should be brown and a knife/fork handle/knitting needle inserted into the centre should come out reasonably clean and not covered in wet cake.
9. Once the cake is done, leave it cool before taking it out of the tin. I usually leave it overnight. Wrap it in tin foil to keep it from going hard.

Icing:

1. Put a few desert spoons of jam into a mug and melt in a microwave. It should only take a minute or so at full power.
2. Brush the melted jam onto the outside of the cake with a pastry brush.
3. Roll out the marzipan with a rolling pin until it's big enough to cover the top and sides of the cake. Use some of the icing sugar to stop it from sticking to the rolling pin or the surface underneath.
4. Cover the cake with the marzipan, smoothing it down with your hands.
5. Make the icing as per the instructions on the pack of icing sugar.
6. Cover the marzipan coating with icing. I find a kitchen scraper works well for this.
7. After a few days drying, the icing should be solid enough to decorate or alternatively, to re-wrap in tin foil.

Cooking: Pear Pie

If there was one thing I was determined to make with our pears this year, it was a pear pie. Maybe that was just because I'm a Pushing Daisies fanboy (*sob*), but with the latest Bombcast playing on my MP3 player, make one I did, and it turned out great, even without the mood-enhancing homoeopathic drugs. :D

I used the pie recipe here and I got a recipe for the crust from here. For some reason, pie dishes seem pretty hard to come by locally, so I busted out a new 9-inch silicon baking tin instead. It's not too deep, so it wasn't a bad substitute. I stuck fairly close to the recipe , but I didn't have any lemons at hand, so the peel wasn't an option and reading over it again, I see that I didn't dot the top of the pie with butter either (doh!). It turned out really well either way with a crumbly, buttery crust and a lovely, surypy, fruity filling. Damn, I'm hungry again now.

Cooking: Pear Crumble

Autumn's just passed which means the mounds of apples and pears from the fruit trees outside are just about gone. This year I thought I'd try a few different things with the pears, beginning with a pear crumble. I got the recipe here, which usefully allows you to scale up or down the quantity of ingredients according to the number of servings you want. I scaled it up to four servings, grabbed some pears and got cracking on it.

I cut up eight smallish pears, which I thought would be about the same as six regular ones, put them in a casserole dish and mixed in the lemon juice. After I'd made the crumble (without nuts, which I didn't have :D), it was pretty clear that the crumble mix wouldn't even cover the pears fully, so I doubled the amount of everything in it. Well, except for the spices, I just put in a teaspoon of each in total. Once I had the crumble on, I popped the dish in the oven and hoped for the best.

The first batch was really tasty, but I thought the crumble was a bit too sweet, so I reduced the amount of sugar to half from then on. I've also tried adding some vanilla to the pears instead of the lemon juice, which was quite nice. I've yet to try adding the nuts back in, but I'm kind of sceptical about them adding much to the dish.

Cooking: Macaroni and Cheese

If you're looking for some comfort food for these miserable winter days you can't go wrong with a bit of macaroni and cheese. Let's make some then!

Ingredients

8oz macaroni
8oz cheddar cheese (EDIT: On second thought, this is an illegal amount of cheese to be adding to this. :D You can totally cut this by half or maybe even three quarters without drastically impacting the flavour)
16 fl oz milk
2 Tablespoons flour
2 Tablespoons butter

Method

1. Cook the macaroni and drain it with a strainer. Press down on the pasta a little with a fork to get out more water if necessary.
   
2. Grate the cheese and set it aside.
3. Preheat the oven to about 180ºC/350ºF
   
4. Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the flour, mixing it into a smooth paste.
5. Cook the mix for a few minutes, stirring to keep it from burning.
6. Add in the milk and stir until the flour and butter paste is dissolved.
7. Cook the mixture until it thickens. keep stirring it in case it starts to burn.
8. Now, add in the cheese and stir the mixture until it's melted.
9. Mix the cheese mixture and macaroni together in a suitably big casserole dish.
   
10. Put the cover on the casserole dish and pop it in the oven for 20 minutes.
11. Eat it, dammit! (EDIT: Ugh.)
    
    

Cooking: The Ultimate Brownie

I saw some one making brownies on TV the other week. It looked fairly straightforward, so I decided to give it a go. A quick search on Google for a recipe threw up one for The Ultimate Brownie. Straight away I knew there could be no other even worth considering and I set about conjuring up this confection of the Gods.

It turns out the recipe was a bit too ultimate for the crappy mixer I was using. As soon as I added a second helping of flour to the mix, I had to shut if off after it coughed out a puff of smoke. With another one having exploded last Christmas, it's not been the best year for kitchen appliances. :D

Having recovered from all that, I was able to kick back and enjoy one of the brownies and it was pretty awesome. Rich and chocolatey with a nice fudgey texture, I should have known that it would come at a price. I'll miss you Sir Mixalot (the mixer..., not the butt guy).

Cooking: Seafood Chowder

I was in the supermarket today and they were selling cartons of fresh shellfish at half price, so I picked up two to make some chowder with. With no idea where to begin, I had a look on the internet. I found a nice, simple recipe on My Sister's Kitchen that didn't require a bajilion obscure ingredients to make. I think I put in a bit too much flour, but it was really nice all the same. You can check it out here.

Oh, and I pretty sure 1c = 1 cup, in case you're similarly befuddled by it.

Cooking: Pumpkin Pie

So, you've carved out a Jack O' Lantern and you're wondering to do with all the leftover Pumpkin flesh. Well, you're going to make a pie of course, so put on your frilliest apron and get your ass into that kitchen. We're going baking!

Now, as I understand it, the kind of Pumpkins used at Halloween aren't typically the type used to make pies with. But I've used them several times and to my unrefined palette, the end result tastes pretty damn good. Let's do this thing.

First you'll want to make the pie crust. I make mine using this recipe at Joyofbaking.com for pecan custard tart. Just ignore everything after the third paragraph, you don't need to pre bake the crust and you don't want it filled with pecans. :)

Next you need to cook and purée the pumpkin flesh. I think the easiest way to cook it is to put it in a microwavable bowl and put it at full power for 10-15 minutes or until it's soft. Then take the cooked pumpkin and process it in a food processor until it's smooth.

Now, with the crust and pumpkin ready, you can use this recipe for making and baking the pie (scroll down to the bottom of the page). It's from a daytime TV show here and I've used it for the last two years. It's nice and easy and it's turned out well for me thus far.

Enjoy your pie and a belated happy Halloween to all!

Cooking: Roasted Pears

Fruit trees seem like a great idea until you have a mountain of the stuff that nobody's interested in touching. In an effort to chip away at this fruity Kilimanjaro, I had a look around on the net for some pear recipes and went for this one.

I didn't manage to get to the "crisp-tender" stage, but I don't think the type of pears we have are actually suitable for cooking. Still though, they were pretty nice, if a bit rich. Worth trying out, I'd say.