Pumpkin Pasties!

Last week I mentioned that I would be cooking a tasty treat from the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook by Dinah Bucholz.  Pumpkin pasties are kind of like those fruit pies you buy at the gas station, but these are probably healthier and they taste a lot better.  Plus, they're MAGICAL!!!  Woo!

For pumpkin pasties you make a dough, like for a pie crust.  You have to refrigerate it for a couple of hours after making it so that it won't separate when you roll it out.

While the dough is cooling you should make the pumpkin filling with a big ol' can of pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling) and put some spices in it (though I think, if you really wanted to, you could just use the pie filling).  When you roll the dough out, you cut out a bunch of circles, about 6 inches.  Put some of the filling on the circle, leaving an inch or so all around.

Fold the dough in half and smush the edges together with a fork.  Make a couple cuts in the top so it can vent.    Line them up on a cookie sheet and bake them until the edges are a little golden brown.

You can even put a little whipped cream on top, but I don't think that's entirely necessary.

Goat Cheese and Broccoli Pizza From Baking by Martha Day

My kitchen is packed with sweets; leftovers of the peach cobbler, Boyfriend made an Italian upside-down apple cake when one of his friends came to dinner, and of course all the Christmas candy you can imagine.  I was craving something a little more savory while I was perusing my recipes, so I chose this pizza for a little change of pace.  It may sound weird but it was delicious, as well as very rich.

Kneading some dough...  

Rolling out the crust

Next time I would add more broccoli to help balance out the richness of the goat cheese.  When you're piling on all the fixins it looks like it will be too tall to be a reasonable pizza, but it settles down in volume while baking, so adding broccoli would be just fine.

Before baking

Tomato sauce, steamed broccoli florets, cherry tomatoes, black olives, goat cheese, parmesan, and mozzarella for good measure.  

Coming up next week....
I found a lovely book at Barnes & Noble today which I will be cooking from next week.  I wet my pants a little when I saw it.  I can't wait to look through it some more and pick a recipe out for the next week!

Picture found here

Mmmmm......Lasagna *Updated*

Lasagna has definitely been my favorite food ever since I was born.  I made one this week for a friend of Boyfriend's that came over for dinner from a family recipe that I'm not at liberty to reveal.  It was a beautiful lasagna, as usual, but instead of showing you a lasagna I can't tell you about, I thought I would give my perspective on the creation of one.

If you are not opposed to pork, I recommend mixing ground sausage in with your ground beef, it adds a certain yummy flavor.  I don't know how to describe it because I'm not a real cook, sorry!  Just more flavors than MEAT flavor. 

Mixing a little bit of spinach in with ricotta makes it healthier, but it's hard to taste the vegetable-ness of it if you've a picky eater on your hands. 

Using ricotta makes the lasagna a little more liquidy, so it doesn't hold it's layered rectangular shape as well as if you just use meat, shredded cheese and noodles.  I really like the ricotta though.

DON'T BE AFRAID TO USE MORE CHEESE.

If you do use chopped spinach, and you get it frozen, thaw it well beforehand and drain it, that will help the lasagna keep its shape as well.

You can build a lasagna and freeze it for a while before you put it in the oven, so you have something for later.

*Also, if you get a fresh block of mozzarella and shred or slice it yourself, that will also make the lasagna more watery, so cut the cheese beforehand to let it dry out a bit, or just use the pre-shredded stuff.

If I could devote my whole life to lasagnas, I would.  I want to know everything about them, and taste all the different kinds.  My favorite so far is from a restaurant in California that my family went to frequently when I was little.  The restaurant was in San Jose, it was called Gallo's.  I think it was family-owned, so of course it was good!  Does anybody else in the blogosphere know any good restaurants for lasagnas?  Or any other tips when making them?

Peach Cobbler

This is by no means a good baked from scratch.  My mom got this recipe from one of those little Betty Crocker or Pillsbury cookbooks that are with the tabloid magazines by the register in grocery stores.  I've made it once with the recipe, but I didn't have the recipe this time, so I winged it.  This is what I did this time... 

Step one:  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Two:  Melt a stick of butter.
3.  Stir the butter into a package of yellow cake mix.  (In a bowl, duh.) 
4.  Mix in a handful-ish of oats.
5.  In a glass baking dish empty two cans of peach pie filling and spread it over the whole pan evenly.
6.  Dump the cake/butter/oats mix over the peaches and spread it evenly over the top to cover the filling. 
7.  Slap it in the oven for about forty-five minutes, until top is golden brown.  Let it cool for a little bit before you eat it.

If you want to do this with fresh fruit, you just chop 'em up and mix the fruit with sugar and cinnamon before you put the cake mix on it.  I have done it this way before with apricots, I think?  It was good. 

I realize these are poor instructions.  What size cans of filling do you use?  What size pan?  I don't know.  You can't go wrong, there's almost no way you could mess this up.  You could put in more butter in the topping, I'm sure, make it a little more crumbly.  And just put in enough fruit to where you think you'd get enough from a scoop of cobbler.  This is where I prefer the fresh or frozen fruit, because sometimes the cans have more syrup than fruit. 

A hot cobbler is always good with a scoop of French vanilla ice cream!