Sweet pumpkin and walnut dumplings

It dawned on me today, as I was sitting cross-legged on a quiet, sunny spot on the South Downs, my unkempt hair falling across my bare, shiny face, that I turn into a complete crusty when I'm in Eastbourne. It's something about being so near to the Downs I think, and with these massive windows we have in our house it's like I become a part of this windswept, weird landscape. There is not that much to do here, yet I am quite happy whiling away the hours cooking, walking and chatting to my parents. This morning my mum and I made pumpkin dumplings

I'm making yet another attempt at generally avoiding sugar and, yet again, my mum has tempted me away from my goal with these gorgeous little mouthfuls of sweet, nutty pumpkin dough. They are a different take on the Polish "lazy dumplings", where we use white curd cheese instead of squash. Actually, yes this is a good point - you can use both pumpkin and orange squash for this - in Polish-speak they are considered the same thing

Halve the pumpkin or squash, take out the seeds, pour over a little olive oil and bake in a very hot oven for about 40min, until you can easily take the flesh out with a spoon. You only need half for this recipe, it makes plenty of dumplings (enough for 4 people). So, allow it too cool a little then scoop the flesh out, add the flour, egg, half the cinnamon and the caster sugar and make the dough. If it's too sticky, add some more flour. Right at the end work the crushed walnuts into the dough and roll it between your hands into a flat, snake shape like that up there. Cut it diagonally and cook in a pan of boiling, slightly salted water. When they pop to the top, give them one more minute, then remove them with one of those spoons with lots of holes in (what are they called again?), allowing as much of the water to drain as possible. Cook them in a large pan and in rounds, not all at once. Once done, place on a large plate with some butter over the top, so that they don't all stick together. You can eat them immediately with brown sugar and more cinnamon, or re-fry later. Both ways are equally delicious

Ingredients

Half a pumpkin or large squash, pureed

400g plain flour

1 egg

4 tablespoons caster sugar

100g walnuts, crushed 

2 teaspoons cinnamon

Pinch of salt

Brown sugar to serve

Butter to serve

A hearty pumpkin soup with pork and pearl barley

I know that hearty soups without meat do exist (I'm sure they do), and I certainly do not feel the need to eat meat every day of the week, yet I have found that the addition of meaty goodness is what constitutes a hearty soup for me personally. At the risk of sounding like a witch, I always like to boil a good carcass. To make my own stock or as a soup base. And I get 2 carcasses for £1 at Ginger Pig, so it's a small price to pay for the depth that it will give a dish. I also bought some good quality lardons from them (by good quality I mean from happy pigs, which is the only kind I like to eat), so this soup is more than a little meaty

Start off by making the chicken and onion stock - boil a couple of carcasses with a peeled onion and some salt for 2-3 hours. You can add a bay leaf in there if you have one, I didn't. Meanwhile, roast the pumpkin, in chunks, with some olive oil and salt, for about 20min. It's much easier to peel then. Drain the stock into a new pan, so that you are left with a clear liquid. Add the pumpkin chunks and any meat that's on the carcasses to the clear stock and allow to cool. Blend. Pour it back in the pan, season with garlic salt, black pepper and nutmeg, then add the pearl barley and bring back to the boil. Simmer until pearl barley is ready (about 30min). Chop the lardons up if they are quite big, like mine were, then fry until crispy. Add to the soup. Deglaze the pan with the soup to get all the flavour off it. Add chilli sauce if you like it spicy

 Ingredients

Half a pumpkin

2 chicken carcasses

1 onion

Handful of Lardons

Pearl barley (large handful)

Garlic salt

Black pepper

Nutmeg

Chilli sauce

Olive oil

As for the seeds, you may want to roast them for an hour with some salt and a little olive oil. Half way through, sprinkle with a little soya sauce and chilli sauce for an amazing beer snack. I like to leave a bit of the pith on there too as it turns brown and crunchy

Pickled Pumpkin

October is one of my favourite times of the year. I like the slight nip in the air, the fact that the sun still comes out often enough for me to run by the canal a few times a week and I especially like the way the wind makes the smell of food cooking carry down the street, so that it seems as if the entire population of London is eating delicious, hearty meals. Even as I write this I smell gravy! I also like the way I start seriously thinking about making mulled wine "sometime soon". I've already made mulled beer... I was coming down with a cold, so it was medication really. I warmed a can of beer with a couple of inches of cinnamon stick, lots of good quality honey (my mum's friend who keeps bees near Rye gave us this "Romney Marsh honey"), a slice of fresh ginger and some freshly grated nutmeg, finishing it off with a squeeze of lemon. It's not quite my dad's creamy mulled beer, but it was very easy and quick to make and it certainly hit the spot - the next day I felt much better
And I love the way I get slightly obsessed with pumpkins now. It's a very short, intense love affair, where I attempt to find as many things to do with the pumpkin as possible before getting thoroughly tired of it and moving on to the next food obsession (mulled wine usually). I've never pickled pumpkin before, so this is truly an exciting experiment for me. I am, however, Polish, therefore I do have a natural confidence with pickling, an almost genetic advantage I like to think

First, take the juice and rind of 1 orange, 2 inches of ginger (peeled and chopped), half a nutmeg and about 3 or 4 cloves and simmer with 2-3 tablespoons of water for approximately 7-8min. Meanwhile in another pan, I cooked half of the peeled and chopped pumpkin (about 300g) in 250ml of white barley vinegar and 2 tablespoons of sugar. The other half of the pumpkin is going in a soup that I shall tell you about shortly. Make sure that the sugar has dissolved first, before you put the pumpkin bits in. Cook for about 5min on a low heat then pour in the spicy water mixture and cook for a further 3-4min. At the same time, in a third pan, you need to steam the jars - you'll need 2. Put them in the pan, pour some boiling water on top, cover, bring the water back to the boil and turn it off. Allow them to steam for about 5min before removing. There are a lot of things going on at once, I know, but believe me, it's all very simple in practice. Put the pumpkin bits in the jars and cover with the liquid. Close the jar immediately and leave to pickle in room temperature for at least 18 hours, before putting in the fridge

Now, this is the proper science experiment bit: As with gherkins, you need to check and see when the taste of the pumpkin is right for you. I will let you know my findings below. Remember, once you open a jar, you should eat the contents within a week

After 18 hours: Already very good! Now the jar is open in the fridge, so it's progress will probably be different to the jar which is closed, but I will let you know how they taste in another 48 hours anyway

A couple of days later: They were indeed a little better after 48 hours, but the difference was not astounding

Pumpkin placki with almonds and honey

It simply wouldn't be Autumn without you being inundated with my pumpkin experiments. So here we go. This is my take on the traditional Polish recipe of "Apple Placki". If you would like to try the original recipe, then simply replace the pumpkin bits with apple bits (they do not need to be cooked obviously) and the nutmeg with cinnamon

We need to cook the pumpkin a little first, before adding it to the batter – par-boil it for around 20 minutes in salted water - before draining, peeling and chopping it into little bits. Sieve the flour into a bowl, add with the egg, milk and yoghurt and blend it into a  batter - just a bit more runny than pancake batter. You may want to beat it a little to get it nice and smooth. Add the sugar, nutmeg and salt. Heat the oil on a large pan and add small ladles of the batter onto it. Fry until golden on both sides. Put the made ones in  a warm oven, drizzle runny honey on top and add the flaked almonds too at this point, so that they brown a little in the oven

 Ingredients

250g flour

1 egg, beaten

1 tblsp yoghurt

1 cup almond milk

½ small pumpkin

1 teaspoon nutmeg

Coconut oil for frying

Pinch of salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon runny honey
Flaked almonds

One last pumpkin dance: the polish, pumpkin breakfast soup

So winter is well and truly here

And yet I still have one more pumkin recipe for you. It's the ultimate pumpkin recipe really, as it is the one I grew up with. As I am at my parents' house in Eastbourne, and there has been a pumpkin sitting in the kitchen since the last time I was here (in September!) which my mum didn't know what to do with, I thought I'd take advantage and remind her about a childhood dish that she used to always make for me at this time of year when we were still living in Poland, and for a time after we moved too. She wasn't sure if she remembered how to make it anymore, but it turned out that her hands had a memory of their own thankfully, so the Polish pumkin soup will live on after all. This is a pumpkin soup with a difference though, because it's sweet and eaten for breakfast

  

Ingredients

1 small pumpkin

150-200g flour

1 egg

700ml milk

1tsp salt

1tblsp sugar

Water

 

Sorry about the photo up there, my mum decided to make the "zacierki" when I was asleep and take the photo herself, and unfortunately it turned out fuzzy. Let me start off by explaining the concept of "zacierki" - they are a cross between little pasta shapes and dumplings, and you can use them in a variety of dishes. They are an integral part of the Polish pumpkin soup. You make them by combining the flour and egg with a little water and forming a dough ball. The dough ball is ready when it stops being sticky and falls away from your hand - just add more flour if it's too sticky. At this point, you have a choice about whether to make the "zacierki" yourself by ripping little bits of the dough ball to form little maggotty shapes - sorry for the comparison, that really is the only way I can think of to exactly describe the size and shape of the thing. Or, if you have time, then you can do what my mum did and put the dough ball in the freezer. Then, once it is hard and you are ready to cook, you take it out and grate it, as shown on the photo. For the actual soup, you cook the pumpkin chunks in a little water until soft, which can take up to 20min. In a separate pan, you cook the "zacierki" in the milk, which takes about 5min. Then, you combine the two, adding sugar and salt to taste

 

It's a really lovely, comforting soup, but then when you have grown up with something, I guess it always is comforting. It may actually taste unusual to a different palate, especially a British one, but anyhow, if you're adventurous, then it's worth giving it a go, because it is something a bit different... I am starting a course of antibiotics today - whopee! It may be a strange thing to get excited about, but I haven't slept properly for a week, and I want my life back. There's some horrible bugs going around out there, so keep warm and look after yourself!

Roast pumpkin quinoa

Perhaps I am a little obsessed with pumpkins right now

But the season only comes round once a year, right? That's not a rhetorical question - I have no idea if what I'm saying is actually true, but i assume that's the case, because it seems to be the only time of year that I eat them. I made this recipe up on my neverending journey home from work today. I don't want to moan, but I don't know what's happened with the transport system recently, it's a bit depressing, especially in gale force winds like we had today in this "green and pleasant land". I shouldn't be sarcastic though, as I do love England. It is very green. And mostly pleasant, if a little unpredictable. So, as usual, I missed my dance/yoga class, and decided to come home and cook something delicious, and healthy, to cheer myself up - I wanted to I'd try and do something a bit different with the quinoa I had in my cupboard

Ingredients (serves 4)

250g Quinoa

1 small pumpkin

Tin of chickpeas

Handful mint

60 g cashew nuts

Handful black olives

2 garlic cloves

1 large chilli

Handful sundried tomatoes

Half a lemon

Walnut oil

Salt and pepper to taste

So I scooped the seeds out of the pumpkin and roasted it on a very high heat (about 220 degrees C) for about half an hour. I cooked the quinoa according to packed instructions (more or less), which took 20min. In that time, I prepared the "pesto", which I guess isn't really pesto at all, since it has no basil or pine nuts in it... I dry roasted the cashew nuts, chopped the mint, garlic and chilli, then blended it all together with lemon juice, walnut oil and some salt and pepper in my precious pestle and mortar.A blender would work just as well I'm sure, I just love my thai pestle and mortar so much that I would rather do it the slow way. It's kinda therapeutic

Of course I made a massive quinoa mess along the way...

Once the quinoa was ready, I added the "pesto", the chopped sundried tomatoes, olives and chickpeas, and let it all steam, with the heat turned off. I peeled the pumpkin, chopped it up and added that in too. You may want to peel it beforehand, especially if you have sensitive hands. My hands seem to be made from asbestos, and I find it much easier to peel once it's soft, so I do it this way. Finally, crumble the goat's cheese in. Stir everything while heating gently for a couple of minutes, before adding more black pepper, perhaps another squeeze of lemon, and serving

I thought that all the ingredients really worked together, yet I hope you feel free to mess around with the quantities and substitute stuff if you want to. Since this recipe was literally born a few hours ago, on the bus, I can hardly be too precious about it. But you should definitely give it a go - I'm sure you know already how  ridiculously good quinoa is for you. I feel that I need to go on a bit of a health kick right now (especially after the Saturday night I had), so this is the perfect start. I also put the seeds on a separate tray and stuck them in the cooling oven once I'd taken the pumpkin out. Tomorrow, I'll add sea salt and have them as a beer snack

Pumpkin soup

It's that time of the year again...

The nights are closing in and there's a nip in the air, who wouldn't want some pumpkin soup? This is one I made last week for myself and my uncle Kazik who is staying with me right now, doing my floors and finishing off all the stuff that the builders have given up on. Soup is always better, in my experience, when you take your time with it. Therefore, I cooked it one night, left it to cool, then blended it the next morning, adding the cream. We then warmed it up and ate it for dinner for two nights running, the second night with penne pasta, which worked really well, and made it into a more complete meal

Ingredients

1 small pumpkin, cut into chunks, with seeds taken out

1 leek, chopped

1 carrot, chopped

1 parsnip, chopped

1 green chilli 

Chicken or vegetable stock

1 tblsp butter

1 tblsp olive oil

1 small single cream

Salt and pepper

Roast the pumpkin in olive oil, with salt and pepper, at about 180 degrees C for about an hour. In the meantime, fry the leek, chilli, carrot and parsnip in the butter. Once they are translucent, add the stock (or water if you prefer) and bring to the boil, then turn the heat down and simmer. Once the pumpkin is ready, peel it and add the bits to the soup, then carry on cooking for another half an hour or so, seasoning at the end. At this point, I turned the heat off and left the soup to infuse overnight, before blending and adding the cream. There's a Polish saying about relationships, which translates as "I don't like my soup reheated". It means that you shouldn't go back to old relationships and try to "reheat" them. I find it so strange, because soup is definitely better reheated, everyone knows that.  Conclusion: sayings that don't make any sense are annoying