Melissa picked a peck of pickled peppers

But first she had breakfast. Pumpkin part 3! I had some very, very yummy pumpkin pie yogurt, topped with this Kashi Apple Orchard granola. It has raisins and apples and some kind of nuts and oats....sooo good!!

I had half a bottle of this apple juice with it, along with my water mixed with pomegranate blueberry that I drink all day long at work. Nice fall-type breakfast!


Lunch was some celery and peanut butter and a chicken sandwich. Not exciting and the picture is even less exciting. I must work on food staging...another day.


So, I didn't pick a peck of pickled peppers. I don't know how much a peck is. But we did have quite a few that needed to be dealt with. We've been harvesting peppers for about a month and just piling them up. Not a peck, probably, but we did have THIS many:

And we didn't pick them already pickled, of course. But every one of these guys ended up in a nice vinegar, salt and garlic bath.


I wish that I had taken a picture of the full jars, but I did not. You get the idea though.

I also put together another jar of dill pickles. These aren't from our garden, but I bought a pile of pickling cucumbers at Lowes Foods on Sunday (it cost me less than $2.00!). I can't wait for these babies to be ready!!



Tonight I decided to use up the apples in the fridge that were going soft. I made some homemade applesauce!!

Yummy apples and cinnamon on the stove:
Applesauce is super easy to make! I peeled, cored and chopped about 8 apples, added 1 cup of water, 1/2 cup of honey, 1 tsp cinnamon, a dash of nutmeg and a splash of lemon juice. Cook it all together until the apples are soft. Let the apples cool and mash it up. I used a hand mixer. It came out just a little chunky, like I like it!



I think I've now preserved everything we had to preserve for the week. I may go buy a bunch more of those cucumbers and look for a bushel of apples, because I'd like to have a cupboard full of this stuff!!

Pumpkin, continued

I wish I had seen this last night when I made my lonnnggg pumpkin post. Anyway, here's a link to a Whole Foods blog post...all about pumpkin! Enjoy!

The Great Pumpkin

"There he is! There he is! It's the Great Pumpkin! He's rising out of the pumpkin patch" ~ Linus

Nope, no Great Pumpkin, it's just me. I've been gone awhile, I know. I've had some things going on that distracted me from this and from my enthusiasm for being in the kitchen, but I'm back and ready to get going all over again!

It's fall, and there seem to be pumpkins everywhere! In the stores, in yards, even in beer! I've never eaten pumpkin outside of the regular pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving, so last week I decided to try pumpkin bread. As usual, I looked for a recipe that had no sugar and found this one on the website for the National Honey Board. To change it up a little, I added cranberries to it. Unfortunately, I didn't have quite enough honey, and I think I overcooked it. It was tasty, but horribly dry. I ate a couple of slices, and then it sat there. I hate that I didn't take a picture of it but, at the moment I wasn't thinking about the blog. Bad me.

This morning, I was struck with the urge to get back in the kitchen. I spent all morning in there! First thing I did was to freeze some bananas. I had no idea that I could do that! I can't wait to use them in all sorts of things. Then I went on a quest to salvage this dry, dry, dry pumpkin bread. It was either use it today, or toss it, which I wasn't excited about doing. My first idea was to make a slice of pumpkin bread french toast.



I simply sliced off a chunk of the bread, dipped it in a mix of egg and milk and cooked it in a pan with some butter - like you would with any other french toast. I didn't add any cinnamon or anything, since it was already full of spices. On the side, I chopped up an apple, sauteed it in some butter, and added some cinnamon and nutmeg. SO GOOD. I will be doing this with apples ALL the time now!! End result of the repurposed pumpkin bread? I'll give it a 3 out of 5. The "french toasting" of it didn't help the fact that it was dry. I didn't have any good maple syrup, so I drizzled some awful "pancake syrup" on the side of the plate to add some moisture. Tasty, but probably one of the worst things for me that I've eaten in awhile!

I still had 3/4 of a loaf of pumpkin bread. We had decided to roast a small chicken for dinner, and came up with the idea of making a stuffing out of the rest of the bread. I was worried about mixing it with celery and onion and how it would all taste.




Here's a semi-accurate version of how I made it. I really kind of just tossed it together, but here's what it was like:

3 cups toasted pumpkin bread croutons
1 stalk of celery, diced
1/3 onion, diced
1 1/2 tbsp poultry seasoning
3 tbsp butter
1/4 - 1/3 cup of chicken broth
handful of dried cranberries

Toss the croutons and cranberries in the poultry seasoning and set aside. Saute the celery and onion in butter until tender. Mix the butter mixture into the croutons, stirring to coat. Add chicken broth to moisten. Place in casserole dish, cover and bake at 350 for 30 minutes. You may want to stir it up half way through, to be sure all the croutons are moistened.

I'll give this reincarnation of the pumpkin bread a 4.5 out of 5. I'll have to try it again with some bread that isn't so dry, but it really was tasty. We've already requested to bring the stuffing to Thanksgiving dinner, and this will be the recipe we use!!

Off to bed now! I'll be back more often, I swear!

To take you out....