Every once in a while, I get a great idea.

I am not a huge bagel person (they are just so big and ready and full of calories! Plus I aways have a blood sugar crash about 2 hours after eating one.) But Michael knows about my obsession with pumpkin so a few weeks ago, he returned from Einstein Bros with a pumpkin bagel with pumpkin cream cheese for me. The bagel was pretty good but the cream cheese was AMAZING! I’ve have a few more pumpkin bagels in the intervening weeks, but only as a vehicle for the delicious pumpkin cream cheese. And then one day it hit me.

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Icing would be incredible.

Yesterday I made several batches of cinnamon rolls and whipped up a batch of Pumpkin Cream Cheese Icing.

I made the cinnamon rolls in lined muffin tins, because I prefer the way they look when they are baked this way.

The Pumpkin Cream Cheese Icing was so good and so easy!

1  6-oz tub of Pumpkin Cream Cheese

1 stick unsalted butter

2 cups powered sugar

1/3- 1/2 can of pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)

Cream together the cream cheese and butter in the bowl of your electric mixer. Slowly add the powdered sugar and beat until it’s all incorporated, then add the pumpkin. I wanted to make pipe-able icing for my cinnamon rolls, so I needed it to be on the thin side. Therefore I used 1/2 can of pumpkin. But if you are icing cupcakes, you’ll want it to be thicker so you should use less pumpkin.

Enjoy!

You know, there are times when- in spite of all your good intentions and planning- outside event conspire to bite you in the ass.

Yesterday was one of those days for me. I had planned to make and serve my new recipe for Stuffed and Roasted Pumpkin on Tuesday, and then blog about it on Wednesday. But Tuesday got a way from me a bit and by the time I started preparing my mise en place together, it became obvious that it was too dark in my tiny kitchen to take photographs with natural light. FOILED!

I decided to put the project off a day so that we could have good pictures for the blog. And woke up Wednesday morning to a gloomy gray, cloud-covered sky. That lasted the whole damned day. FOILED AGAIN! This time, I decided to soldier on.

The thing about a recipe such as this one is that you don’t really need a recipe. All you really need is the idea– then you can run with it and make it your own.  It’s sort of like Thanksgiving stuffing. You find a version you like and then you tweak it to make it your own.

So here’s my version of a Stuffed and Roasted pumpkin.

Step 1: There is really no way around this. You are going to have to cut the top off your pumpkin Jack O’Lantern-style (reserving the lid) and clean it out. There is not much i this world I hate as much as cleaning out pumpkin guts. That feeling of the pumpkin juice drying on your forearms is just too much to be bear.  But it must be bourn, I guess, if you want to eat a stuffed pumpkin. Scrape out all the seeds and stringy stuff- I find it helps to think really hard about something else while you’re doing it.

Rinse the pumpkin inside and out and then pat dry with paper towels.

Step 2: Assemble your stuffing ingredients. You will need bread (preferably day-old) cut into one inch cubes. I use a round Italian loaf from Harris Teeter, La Brea Bakery brand, I think. I actually cubed my bread the night before because the drier your bread is, the most deliciousness it will absorb.

Pretty much everything else is optional, depending on our taste. For this stuffing I used:

1 large Honey Crisp apples, diced

1/4 pound of gruyere cheese, cubed

6 ounces of pancetta, died and browned

a handful of dried cranberries

four or five sprigs of thyme, leaves stripped

one minced garlic clove

Throw everything in a large bowl along with your bread crumbs and mix well. I used my hands because, after spending half an hour elbow deep in a pumpkin, I was up for anything.

I DID NOT add salt to the stuffing mixture. There was plenty of salt in the pancetta and the gryuere to season the whole recipe, but I did add a few twists of fresh ground black pepper.

Step 3: Stuff everything into your pumpkin. You can really cram it in there, sense there are no food safety issues here as there are with stuffing a turkey. Fuller is better.

Step 4: You’ll need to add some kind of liquid to your stuffing at this point. I used one pint of heavy cream, because that’s what Dorie Greenspan used, and what my friend Sean used when he made a version of this last weekend. Sean referred to the results as a savory bread pudding stuffed in a pumpkin, and that was the result I was going for here. You could also use 1 1/2 -2 cups chicken stock here, or even vegetable stock. You want to add enough liquid to moisten the stuffing very well, but you don’t want it to be soupy.

Step 5: Pop the reserved pumpkin top back on and roast the pumpkin on a baking sheet at 350 for two hours, removing the cap for the last ten minutes to allow a bit of the liquid to evaporate. You wan the pumpkin to be fork-tender but not collapsing when it is done.

Now, by this point in my cooking process, my kitchen was almost completely dark. I couldn’t even get a bad picture with every light in the kitchen on. So I am going to rather shamelessly swipe my friend Sean’s picture of his version of this recipe so you can see what this thing will look like when it comes out of the oven. We used very different kinds of pumpkins but the idea is the same.

Now here’s the fun part. Doris Greenspan says that you can either use a big spoon to stir everything together, scraping the pumpkin from the side and mixing it into the pumpkin like I did (delicious but not so pretty) or you can slice the pumpkin the way Sean did. Sean is a braver man than me.

Obviously, Sean’s way makes for a much better presentation. Who could be unimpressed by this?

My friend Susie made another version of this recipe and posted it on her blog.  She is the former editor of the only cooking magazine that matters, Fine Cooking Magazine, and is a much better planner than I, as all her photos are lovely and taken long before sundown. Also, she and I used the same kind of pumpkin– the Long Island Cheese pumpkin, and you should pop over there just to see how mine would have looked if I had been born more organized.

The Stuffed and Roasted pumpkin was absolutely delicious. My family was skeptical until they tasted it– it is positively ambrosial! The combination of the salty pancetta and the sweet apples was sublime. And the gruyere! Oh my Lord, the gruyere!

This would make a great Thanksgiving side dish, although I encourage you to try it at least once before then as a confidence booster.

Greetings from Day 30 + 2!

Mike and I spent the last month following the Whole 30 plan. Basically, on Whole 30, you eat all the vegetables, proteins and fruits that you want, but cut out all grains, sugar, alcohol, white potatoes and legumes.

Strange as it sounds, Whole 30 was both way easier and much more difficult than I had anticipated. The first few days were rough! I didn’t realize quiet how addicted to sugar and grains we were. Giving up bread was also pretty rough. I can’t tell you how often I wanted to reach for toast or a peanut butter sandwich over the last month.

For the first week or so of Whole 30, I was exhausted and cranky. My body was so used to getting some kind of sweet treat to get me through the afternoon, not to mention two or three Coke Zeros throughout the day. But at about Day 10, my energy level normalized and, I can honestly, say, I’ve never felt better in my life.

The hardest part by far, though, was the cooking. I’m a pretty good cook and cooking is something I really enjoy, but Whole 30 required a whole lot more time than I am used to spending in the kitchen. We usually eat out two or three nights a week, but on Whole 30, eating out is nearly impossible.

Besides the fact that nearly everything we ate had to be cooked by me, when you eliminate grains from your diet, you eat a lot of vegetables. Like, a staggering amount of vegetables. One book I read said you should plan on 6 cups of vegetables per person per day. We didn’t always eat that much, but there were definitely some days that we did. Truly, I have never eaten so many vegetables in my whole life.

I found that it was much easier to prep a bunch of meals at one time. For example, if we were having steak for dinner, I would grill tomorrow nights chicken at the same time. Chopping vegetables for two or three meals similarly seemed to save time and kept me from washing a mountain of dishes every night. (You will need a lot more food storage containers than you think!)

Another lesson I learned was that, when you’re cutting out the sugar and grain, you have to find ways to amp up the flavor in your meals. I used a lot more spices and rubs in my cooking than I normally do.  Since soy sauce and store bought condiments and salad dressings are out, you really have to think out your marinades and sauces, too.

I think that the main thing I learned was that, while eating a whole, clean diet, you can’t just wing it. Having a fridge full of pre-chopped vegetables at least gives you options of throwing together a salad or a stir fry at the last minute.

I do have to admit here that I was wrong about something. I few weeks ago, I did a blog post about the documentary Fed Up. In the comments, reader Susan S. posited that eating a whole food diet was something that only rich people can afford and I disagreed with her. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this issue and I have to concede that Susan S. has a point. While buying fresh, whole vegetables and, say, a whole chicken, might be cheaper than even a fast food meal out for a family of four, it takes a whole lot more time and effort to turn that fresh food into dinner. And for people living at or below the poverty line, that may be time that they just don’t have to devote to food prep.

Of course, you can spend more money to buy pre-cut veggies and boneless skinless chicken breast, but then you do get into a situation where dinner from the drive through probably does cost the same or even less, without all the work.

(Susan S., I apologize for dismissing what you said about this without giving it some serious thought. I generally hold myself to a higher standard than that, and I am sorry. While I may disagree with on the science, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have been open to hearing you out. I hope you can accept my sincere apology.)

The big question is, will be be adopting Whole 30 full time? Probably not in it’s hardcore form. Our eating habits have definitely changed dramatically over the last 30 days, and we will absolutely be keeping a lot of these changes. I don’t see us going back to regularly eating bread or pasta at home– it will be something for special occasions or dinners out. I also plan to continue replacing starches with vegetables, vegetable and more vegetables.

And we will not be going back to eating sugar the way we did before. Mike and I have both started reading labels and astonishing each other with the amount of sugar in food (almost 10 teaspoons in a can of Coke!). For the past month, we’ve finished meals with fruit and I expect that to continue. Mike and I each lost about 10 pounds in the last month, and I think that is nearly all due to cutting out the sugar.

Going forward, we will be shooting for an 80/20 balance, eating mostly clean, whole foods. And I’m planning to repeat the hardcore Whole 30 three or four times a year to make sure we stay on track.

Sorry for the super wordy post! I would love to hear your experiences with this kind of diet.

Independence Day is just over a week away so it seemed like a great time to re-post my recipe for Blueberry Slab Pie with Strawberry Marscarpone Ice Cream. Slab pies are a great way to feed dessert to a crowd and blueberries are super cheap right now at the farmer’s market. Enjoy!

Blueberry Slab Pie

A few weeks ago, Mike and I were fortunate enough to procure the services house sitter extraordinaire, Sandra Hucher. When we hired Sandra to stay with our three dogs, two cats and tank full of fish for the weekend, we had no idea how lucky we were to be able to get her at all. Sandra’s services are in super high demand and she is already booked up for the travel we are doing for the rest of the year. Sandra literally wrote the book on house sitting. She once had a house sitting gig that last two years!

But I digress. After she’d arrived at our house and we’d given her the complete run down on all of our various pets various diets and schedules, Sandra told us she was really excited to be staying at our house this weekend because there was a documentary she really wanted to see playing at a theater nearby. The film is called Fed Up and it hadn’t even crossed my radar when Sandra mentioned it.

But then Mike heard an interview with Katie Couric about it and I started seeing it pop up on some of the Whole30 blogs I was reading, so last night we decided to check it out.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Fed Up should do for obesity what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change. Basically the movie looks at the obesity rates in the U.S. (and to a growing extent, the world) and gets to the bottom of our ever-increasing back sides. The foremost authorities on nutrition, obesity, metabolic disease and food are interviewed and they basically all come to one conclusion: sugar is killing us. By 2030, fully HALF of all Americans will be obese and 1 in 3 will have diabetes. Think about that for a minute. Those numbers are staggering.

I know that all of us hate to think about a world without the occasional cupcake or cookie, but that’s really not what we’re talking about here. It’s the hidden sugars in processed foods and soft drinks that are the culprit. How it got these is a longer story which the film explains, breaking the science down.

I consider myself to be fairly well-informed in matters of food and nutrition but I learned so much that I didn’t know. For example, I’ve always believed that a calorie is a calorie, no matter what form it takes.  Not so, according to the experts. I was also unaware of the incredible additive properties of sugar– in a study, 40 cocaine addicted rats were given the choice of cocaine or sugar water. 40 out of 40 of them picked the sugar water every time.  Mind boggling, yes?

I’m urging you to go see Fed Up if it’s playing in a theater near you. And consider taking the Fed Up 10 Day Challenge, 10 days of abstaining from sugar. (I’m on my 12 day without sugar and I am only just now starting to get over my cravings!)

If you’ve seen the movie or read about it, I’d love to get your opinion.