Squash Soup & Horseradish Cream

Even though this is the first week of January – 17 days closer to Spring since the Winter Solstice – we’re still enjoying the last of fall’s harvest, 10 lbs of organic apples and half-a-dozen organic butternut squash still remain. When the last of the squash are eaten, I’ll tap into my dehydrated food storage from which I can continue making brown-sugar Hubbard pies, Kobocha pancakes, pumpkin gnocchi or risotta, and butternut squash muffins, the transition from whole-squash to dehydrated, transparent to my family. In the 20 years I’ve been dehydrating foods, the last half-dozen years using several Excalibur dehydrators, I just feel so thankful I’m able to preserve our food – its taste, texture and flavor, as well as “retaining its living food nutritional values – vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, and phytonutrients preseved – without hot water bath canning, which destroys heat liable nutrients, or freezing, which doesn’t eliminate bacterial growth.

Posted on Jan 04, 2009 by Sharon in Recipes and | Permalink | Comments(0)
tags: dehydration, gougeres, soup, squash

A pâte à choux by any other name...

…is not a biscuit.

Recipe names and cooking terms, used in my training-wheels 1970’s Betty Crocker Cookbook, were simple, dump ‘n stir recipes, in plain English: Quick Bread, Yeast Bread, Spoon Bread, Muffins, Biscuits, Pancakes, Cakes and Cream Puffs…..

Wait. Now that I think about it, “cream puffs” – real ones, made from pâte à choux [pah-ta-shoo] dough – were not included in this type of cookbook because they did not fit the goal of being easily recreated AND successfully duplicated by 99.999999% of any living, breathing, human being no matter their food interest or cooking skill level.

Posted on Dec 30, 2008 by Sharon in Recipes and | Permalink | Comments(2)
tags: bread, gougeres, pate a choux