Catching up over Pumpkin

Oh for shame.  I’m publishing two recipes that use ingredients that are post-season.  If I hadn’t frozen so many cranberries and roasted, pureed and frozen so much pumpkin, I might have thought better of publishing these recipes.  However, I keep pulling out my laptop and opening up the recipes in Word, so why the hell not just put them on readyprepgo.com? Read more

Pumpkin Cranberry Baked French Toast

 

Nothing moves my morning along like the aroma of pumpkin pie mingling with my morning coffee. This breakfast takes no time to whip up the night before- I often do it while dinner is baking or sautéing. I’ve shortened the prep time even further by grinding the mix of spices in a batch so I just have to add a teaspoon of it. It’s basically “pumpkin pie spice.” The next morning, I stagger bleary-eyed downstairs and throw it in the cold oven and move on to the business of the morning. By the time the lunches are made, breakfast is ready. Read more

Pumpkin Cranberry Baked Oatmeal

You guessed it. This is an autumnal riff on Funky Monkey Baked Oatmeal. The cravings for pumpkin and cranberries begin with the first ruby maple leaf and don’t wane until the appearance of the first crocus. Read more

Cranberry Maple Syrup

The color of this breakfast condiment is brilliant magenta.  It looks amazing on top of vivid orange pumpkin pancakes but is also quite fetching on a simple slice of french toast.  The cranberry flavor melds perfectly with the maple.  Each mellows out and balances the other- like my marriage. Read more

Cranberry Pumpkin Muffins

Adapted from Gourmet Magazine, November 2008
Makes about 18 standard-sized muffins

I make these from the first change of the leaves in the fall until the snowdrops bloom.   Read more

Cranberry-sauced Chicken with Parsnips and Orange

Adapted from In a Vermont Kitchen by Amy Lyon and Lynne Andreen

I picked up an author-signed copy of In a Vermont Kitchen in a discount bin at a resort in Vermont about 10 years ago.  I had just developed an interest in the idea of cooking and thought the recipes sounded pretty good.  Because I was a culinary idiot at that time, most of the books I bought back then I have since discarded- figuring out that the recipes in them were not so great. This is one of the few cookbooks from that era that has survived in my cookbook library. Read more