Smashing Pumpkins - it's not all about soup!

Great session helping people make some different and delicious things with pumpkins today. 

We started with a little chat about which pumpkins worked best for different recipes. Essentially, there are more watery-fleshed ones (usually with a lighter orange, pink or yellow skin), and drier-fleshed ones which tend to either be darker skinned, green skinned, striped or white). They all taste good, but the drier fleshed ones work better in pumpkin pie, cakes and pumpkin gnocchi. 

If you bake either type, they will loose water, and if you mash the wetter types, then put them in a sieve, you can reduce the amount of water. Happily, if you use the water, you can make a rather nice pumpkin-juice lemonade, which is how we started the cooking preparation, and seemed to go down very well (if fighting over seconds is any indication!). 

Next on the menu was pumpkin gnocchi made using a Crown Prince squash with its lovely dry dark-orange flesh that contrasts with the characteristic grey-green skin. Tracey had prepared the pumpkin in advance by baking it whole in the oven - much less effort than cutting it up, as it cuts like butter when cooked. You just slice off the top, scoop out the seeds and then scoop out the flesh with a spoon. The texture is so smooth, you can just mash it like potato. The recipe below is useful, but you need to allow for different levels of moisture in different pumpkins, so Tracey actually made the gnocchi by estimating. The great thing about these little pillows of pumpkin and flour is that they are great to make in a group - many hands definitely make light work. And they have loads of pumpkin in them and they work really well with sage and garlic butter and parmesan. It's also possible to make them vegan if you leave out the egg. 

Gnocchi going down very well with the willing workers.

After our gnocchi snack, we then went on to make pumpkin pancakes with toffee sauce, which were a really big hit with the children especially - most of them asking for their own personal "stack"! 

Thanks to all who attended, and we hope you've taken away some new ideas.



The "how to" photos below are from another session some years ago now.

Ingredients

Pureed pumpkin flesh, with as little moisture as possible

Plain or self-raising flour

Eggs

Salt 

Nutmeg

Method

Add 1 egg for every 1/2 pint  / 280ml of pumpkin and whisk
(We had 1 1/2 pints)

Then start to add flour.

Keep adding flour until you need to use your hands to kneed
the mixture lightly. Do the minimum work to get it firm
enough to make into discs about 4cm in diameter (use lots
of flour on your hands to avoid overworking the mixture). If the
mixture is right, it will feel a bit like your earlobe if you pinch it!

You can also tell if the mix is right when the gnocchi
can hold the indentation of the prongs of a fork.

Gnocchi ready to cook. The traditional shape comes from
squeezing in the sides of the circle.

Boil the gnocchi in batches. If made with plain flour, they
will be done as soon as they rise to the surface of the water.

We served the gnocchi with garlic and sage butter - essentially just 2 cloves of garlic gently heated in the butter with about 15 sage leaves chopped finely, and finely grated strong cheese. They were a big hit!

Pumpkin Pancakes with Toffee Sauce

Ingredients

50g butter

225g self-raising flour

2 tsp baking powder

50g caster sugar

Up to 200ml milk

2 medium eggs

500g pumpkin puree (roast pumpkin until soft, blend then rest in a sieve 

until most of the liquid has gone)

1 tsp cinnamon

For the toffee sauce – it’s easy to make your own

50g unsalted butter

50g light muscovado sugar

2 tbsp double cream

Make the toffee sauce. Put ingredients into a heavy bottomed pan and bring slowly to the boil then turn down the heat for another 3 – 5 minutes. Stir frequently during cooking. 

Put flour, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar into a bowl and stir to blend. Add eggs, pumpkin and half the milk if pumpkin is one of the drier types. Whisk until smooth and thick, adding more milk as necessary to give a thick batter. You are looking for something that spreads to a ½ cm thickness in the pan.

Heat a large, non-stick frying pan. Put a knob of butter in the pan and melt ensuring it doesn’t reach smoking heat. Add 4 tablespoonfuls of the batter, spaced well apart, and cook for bout 2 minutes until they are slightly brown on the bottom. Flip and cook for another minute. Transfer to a metal or china plate and keep warm by keeping a cloth over them, or eat as soon as they are cool enough.

Serve with toffee sauce if liked (many types are on sale if you don’t fancy making it, but give it a try – it’s really easy).