More from the Pumpkin Patch

We had Trick or Treaters! Some may think that is not such a big deal, but we live 17 miles from town and in the 30+ years we've lived here, I think these were the first! It was fun to see them and share some goodies with them.
I'm glad that pumpkin flavored foods are popular for a couple of months so we can enjoy the favorite tasty treats for quite a while. Each year I try a few more recipes, and here are 2 new ones from this year.

Baked Pumpkin Donuts

 Ingredients:

doughnuts

•    1/2 cup vegetable oil

•    3 large eggs

•    1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

•    1 1/2 cups pumpkin purée (canned pumpkin)

•    1 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice, or 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon plus heaping 1/4 teaspoon each ground nutmeg and ground ginger

•    1 1/2 teaspoons salt

•    1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

•    1 3/4 cups + 2 tablespoons all purpose flour

coating

•    3 tablespoons cinnamon-sugar

Instructions:

1) Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease two standard doughnut pans. If you don't have doughnut pans, you can bake these in a standard muffin tin; they just won't be doughnuts.

2) Beat together the oil, eggs, sugar, pumpkin, spices, salt, and baking powder until smooth. 

3) Add the flour, stirring just until smooth.

4) Fill the wells of the doughnut pans about 3/4 full; use a scant 1/4 cup of batter in each well. If you're making muffins, fill each well about 3/4 full; the recipe makes about 15, so you'll need to bake in two batches (unless you have two muffin pans).

5) Bake the doughnuts for 15 to 18 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center of one comes out clean. If you're making muffins, they'll need to bake for 23 to 25 minutes.

 6) Remove the doughnuts from the oven, and after about 5 minutes, loosen their edges, and transfer them to a rack to cool.

 7) While the doughnuts are still warm (but no longer fragile), gently shake them in a bag with the cinnamon-sugar. If you've made muffins, sprinkle their tops heavily with cinnamon-sugar.

 8) Cool completely, and wrap airtight; store at room temperature for several days.

Yield: about 12 regular size doughnuts, or 4 1/2 dozen mini doughnuts

Soft Glazed Pumpkin Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:

1/2 cup softened butter

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup pumpkin puree (canned pumpkin)

1 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

2 large eggs

4 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

for the glaze:

3 cups powdered sugar

4 tablespoons water

1/4 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare baking sheed with parchment paper and set aside. In mixer bowl, cream softened butter and granulated sugar. Add following ingredients in this order, mixing after each addition: powdered sugar, oil, eggs, vanilla, pumpkin. Mix until smooth. Mix all dry ingredients together and add slowly to creamed mixture. Scoop into prepared baking sheet using 1 1/2 tablespoon scoop and flatten slightly with the bottom of a glass (press bottom of glass in granulated sugar before flattening to prevent sticking. Bake 10 minutes. 

When cookies are cool, mix glaze ingredients and spread over each cookie. (I add 2 Tablespoons meringue powder to the glaze to make it firmer)

Happy Halloween!

Teatime to Tailgates

Food, community, K-State, friends - some of my favorite things. A presentation I heard last week by Jane Marshall, a food journalist in the College of Human Ecology at Kansas State University about her new book Teatime to Tailgates brought all these together. The book includes stories of K-State history, recipes, and tributes to the 150  year celebration of the university.
The food we eat tells about where we came from, who we are, who we want to be, and where we live. In Teatime to Tailgates we see the connections of food and fellowship that make a community. The chapters start with "Teatime on Frontier's Edge" which includes how to bake a pie in a cast iron pan and Cowboy Cabbage. Following chapters, stories and recipes take the reader/cook through the turn of the new century (1900), grasshopper plague (a recipe for Chocolate Chirp Cookies made with roasted crickets), early 4-H recipes, meals for wheat cutting crews, and international recipes of the 1970's. One chapter especially recognizes Kansas' agriculture products - meat and wheat -"The Land of Steak and Pie". The last chapter is a celebration of  food and K-State with recipes and stories of cupcakes, ice cream (Call Hall!), and carmel corn from professors, and the "Food for Fifty" and "Food for Five" books of the College.
This book is a delight. I can't wait to try some of the old favorites again, and some for the first time. One of my favorites is a K-State legend, I often had my kids bring home the K-State Crown Roll for holiday meals while they were students. When I was working as Extension agent, it wasn't a successful conference unless we had at least one meal in the Union with K-State Crown served. Thinking about it now motivates me put it on the plans for this year's holiday meals. This recipe is an update and mixes the dough in the bread machine.

K-State Crown Rolls

(credited to Merna Zeigler food service director at the K-State Union for more than 20 years)

1 ½ cups lukewarm water (100-115 degrees)

¾ cup lukewarm milk (95 degrees, warm 35 seconds in high-powered microwave)

1 egg

3 ½ cups bread flour

3 tablespoons sugar

3 tablespoons vegetable shortening or butter

1 ½ teaspoons salt

2 (.025 oz) packages active dry yeast

¼ cup pecan pieces

¾ cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

3-4 tablespoons melted butter

5-7 whole maraschino cherries

Pecan halves

Load water, milk and egg into bread machine. Add flour, sugar, butter and salt. Top with yeast.

Set bread cycle to dough. Remove dough from machine upon completion of the cycle.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease with shortening or coat the bottom and sides of a tube cake pan with nonstick cooking spray.

Sprinkle pecan pieces in bottom of pan. Mix together ¾ cup sugar and cinnamon. Divide dough into 18 equal pieces. Form each piece into a uniform roll. Lightly coat each roll with oil and roll in cinnamon-sugar mixture. Arrange twelve rolls on the outside and six rolls in the middle of the pan. Cover; let rise until double.

Bake for 40 minutes or until done. Tent top with foil if necessary to prevent over-browning. Garnish with maraschino cherries.

Yield: 18 servings

This has been a favorite of my good friend/relative Sharon F. also.
She made it for a family Christmas a couple of years ago.
Glad she could share the recent day at K-State with me! 

I never met a Lasagna I didn't Like!

Ready to go in the oven

Garfield is clearly a lover of all things lasagna. Our family is also, and I've tried several lasagna recipes in the past. The only problem with lasagna is that now that I'm cooking for two most of the time, a pan of lasagna last a lo-o-o-ng time. Cutting out chunks of it to freeze didn't seem to work well either. So I recently tried Lasagna Roll-Ups. Instead of a big slab, this recipe presents lasagna in individual serving size rolls. I found these easy to make, serve, and freeze; so now perhaps "once again, my life has been saved by the miracle of lasagna".

Lasagna Roll-Ups

from Kraft Foods, I changed the proportions to use more ground beef. This made 10 lasagna rolls for me with a little sauce and meat left. I mixed that with the remains of a couple of bags of pasta found in the cabinet (and cooked) and pepperonis. Another freezer meal for later!

2 pounds ground beef
1 jar (26 oz) spaghetti sauce
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
2 eggs, lightly beaten
15 oz container ricotta cheese
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
10 lasagna noodles, cooked, drained
1 cup Mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup Parmesan (additional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brown meat in skillet and drain. Add half of the jar of spaghetti sauce and stir into meat. Add tomato sauce to the remaining spaghetti sauce.
Mix egg, ricotta cheese and 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese.
Cook noodles according to package instructions, adding a few to the water at a time and stirring. Cook to the al dente stage. Remove the noodles from the boiling water in first-in-first-out order. When noodles have cooled slightly, spread each with 2 heaping tablespoonfuls of ricotta/egg/Parmesan mixture, Top this with a scant 1/4 cup meat mixture and 2 heaping tablespoons mozzarella cheese.

noodle-ricotta-hamburger-cheese

and roll

Roll up each noodle from a short end. Place in a greased 9x12-inch baking pan. Pour spaghetti/tomato sauce over noodles. Sprinkle with remaining Mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses. Cover with foil and bake 45 minutes or until hot and bubbly.

Pumpkin Patch

One year we had a great pumpkin patch. When the kids were young they planted pumpkin seeds in the lot that had previously been home to a neighborhood of A-frame huts housing mama sows and baby pigs. This rich soil grew great pumpkins with an abundant carpet of vines. We did everything pumpkin - they even sold some - an early business endeavor.
Pumpkin is a favorite fall, or anytime, flavor with our family, but now I prefer to buy canned pumpkin instead of cleaning and cooking the patch variety. This time of the year, I usually have some canned pumpkin in the refrigerator left from one recipe waiting for the next preparation. Or it can be added to smoothies, waffles, or cake mixes. Here are a couple of new recipes we've enjoyed.

Simple ingredients!

MINI FALL PUMPKIN PIE CROISSANTS

(These were served at a recent meeting of our PEO chapter, everyone enjoyed them so that the hostesses shared the recipe, when I made this at home I used 1/2 recipe/1 tube of refrigerated crescent rolls)

 2 tubes of Pillsbury refrigerated crescent rolls. Roll each crescent roll out and cut lengthwise in 2. This recipe will make 32 mini croissants. Each croissant will get a generous teaspoon of the luscious cream cheese pumpkin pie filling:

4 oz. (1/2 block) of softened cream cheese

1 cup of canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)

1 – 2 T pumpkin pie spice (adjust to taste)

3 – 4 T sugar (granulated or powdered; adjust to taste if you want the filling sweeter)

 Beat the above ingredients together until fluffy and creamy and spread about one teaspoon of filling over each triangle of dough. Mix together 4 T sugar and 1 T pumpkin pie spice and roll each pumpkin pie croissant in it. Bake at 375 for about 13-15 minutes they should be lightly browned and the dough baked through.

Another recipe from Southern Living magazine that was a hit is one I'll use again and again:

PUMPKIN STREUSEL MUFFINS

Makes 2 dozen

¾ cup butter, softened

1 (8-oz). package cream cheese, softened

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

2 large eggs

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp. pumpkin pie spice

½ tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. salt

1 ½ cups canned pumpkin

½ cup toasted chopped pecans

½ cup sweetened dried cranberries

½ tsp. vanilla extract

Pumpkin Pie Streusel:

Stir together ½ cup shopped pecans

            ½ cup firmly packed light brown sugar,

            1 Tbsp. all-purpose flour

            1 Tbsp. melted butter

            ¼ tsp. pumpkin pie spice

1.     Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat butter and cream cheese at medium speed with a heavy-duty electric stand mixer until creamy. Gradually add sugars, beating until light and fluffy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until blended after each addition.

2.     Stir together flour and next 4 ingredients. gradually add to butter mixture, beating at low speed. Stir in pumpkin and next 3 ingredients.

3.     Spoon batter into 2 lightly greased (12-cup) muffin pans, filling two-thirds full. Sprinkle with Pumpkin Pie Streusel.

4.     Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks 5 minutes, remove from pans to wire racks, and cool 20 minutes.

And, for a fun touch, this from Pinterest - 'Candy Corn' dessert. In a glass cup layer chunk pineapple, mandarin orange slices and whipped topping. Top with candy corn pieces.