I’ll confess it, of all the delicious, complicated baked things there are in this wide world to eat, these simple pastries are my favorite. They are more “squares” of caramel-pumpkin pie than they are cookie-like “bars”. In pastry shops, pie squares like these are made on sheet pans (jelly roll pans), but I thought a […]
READ ONI’m including two different dough recipes. The first is the skimpier quantity I use, since it makes bars that I think have the optimum crust-to-filling ratio. However since rolling that quantity of pie dough out thin enough to cover the interior of a 10″ x 13″ baking pan can be a bit challenging (especially for […]
READ ONFor all of you who may have already bought pie pumpkins for next week and are (perhaps) wondering what to do with them, reader Mary Sue has chimed in with an outstanding idea: The only thing I’ve ever found fresh pumpkin good for is Calabaza en Tacha (pumpkin in syrup), a Mexican dish that’s typically […]
READ ON…to refresh your spices. Which is a more civilized way of saying: pitch out your old ones and buy new! I’m betting those ground cloves haven’t seen the light of day since last December. If you’ve got whole nutmeg hanging around, that’s OK, it’ll last three years. But the ground stuff isn’t reliable after three […]
READ ONIt’s an odd fact that a little bit of pre-cooking can rid a batch of canned pumpkin of any of its vaguely metallic or musty flavors. It’s something I didn’t actually believe until a couple of years ago, when I tried it for myself. Like rinsing and “steeping” canned whole tomatoes before puréeing them into […]
READ ONIn fact it’s not the sum total of the weight that Oprah’s lost following fad diets the last 25 years. It’s the weight of the 2008 world record pumpkin that was grown this year in by Thad Starr of Pleasant Hill, Oregon. Though that’s ample to say the least, it’s over 150 pounds shy of […]
READ ONWe’re well into the week and I’m done with s’mores, so we need a quickie. I’ve been craving — and I mean seriously craving — caramel pumpkin bars. They are, no exaggeration, my favorite “pastry” ever. They work like pumpkin pie, only they’re flat. Plus, they’re easy. I’m gonna go for it.
READ ONFor about a year now, I’ve been trying to locate some inexpensive furniture for my garage/office out here in the back 40 of the Pastry family estate. What’s a garage/office? you may well ask. Well it’s more comfortable than it sounds. The previous owners of our house ran a hot sauce business out of this […]
READ ONIt’s all well and good to prepare an assortment of premium homemade s’more components, but putting them together, that’s the critical last step. It can be a bit tricky. Certainly, given the freshness of the ingredients, there are more than a few folks out there who’d be just as happy to whip together a plain, […]
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