If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been on a pumpkin & squash kick around here lately. Roasted pumpkin seeds, pureed pumpkin…and the butternut squash soup. And as if that weren’t enough, I also made some pumpkin bread last week that we have just been devouring!

My first taste of pumpkin bread came about 5 months ago when Mack and I went to visit some expats that are new to the area. They have a daughter who just turned 5 and another little girl about 9 months old — and Mack just adores them both. Their mother had just made some delicious pumpkin bread with chocolate chips in it…and that was really the first I’d ever heard about this delicious stuff. But clearly I was missing out!

My pumpkin bread has a very mild flavor but if you want something with more kick, you can add 1/2-1 teaspoon more of each spice. This is a big batch recipe, and makes 3 full-sized loaves of moist, delicious bread. So if you have no idea if you could eat that much or just don’t want to, either cut the recipe in half, or surprise your neighbor or co-worker with a loaf of this delicious pumpkin bread as a gift.

You can save this in plastic wrap or foil for about a week on your counter if it’s cool in your house — or up to two weeks in the fridge. It will get a bit moister as the time passes. I also think this would freeze really well but haven’t tried it yet.

While I was running around trying to find things to put on our Thanksgiving table, I saw some butternut squash on sale. I knew it would make a nice addition to our table as far as looks go, but I cannot recall ever eating butternut squash in my life. Until last week.

As you probably know, I’m not a fan of wasting good. And butternut squash is a perfectly good food that I wasn’t about to throw away just because I’ve never had one before. So I started looking around online and figured out that I could make a nice soup with it. The cool thing with butternut squash soup is that once you have a basic recipe, you can put any combination of other things into it finish off the soup, giving you a new soup experience every time.

This Spicy Thai Butternut Squash Soup has a nice kick to it, but if you end up with something a bit too spicy for your liking, you can add a bit more cream or even sour cream to the finish product to make it milder. I’m always really apprehensive making soups around my husband because he’s typically not a fan, but he absolutely loved this. And the shrimp is a nice complimenting flavor that gives you a nice protein boost.

The basis of this soup is roasted butternut squash which is really simple to do as long as you have a good knife. Another useful tool for this recipe is a puree stick, blender or food processor because you’re going to want to create a uniform soup consistency instead of a stew.

Butternut squash recipes are generally quite low carb friendly, with this particular squash having about half the carbs of potatoes. In fact, this soup reminds me a lot of potato soup although butternut squash has a slightly sweeter taste to start off.

Be sure to stop over at my latest giveaway for a chance to win $25 worth of natural, organic and gluten-free baking products of your choice!

To me, Thanksgiving is not officially Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie.

There were several years here in Germany that we just let Thanksgiving day slip by, cooking something traditionally American for the day, but not really going to all the trouble. And a few times, we managed to get invited to someone else’s Thanksgiving Day celebration which was great. But once we moved into our farmhouse, we decided it was time to be adults and start hosting our own Turkey Day soiree

Now it might sound funny, but in order to achieve pumpkin pie in Germany, we actually brought back cans of Libby’s pumpkin puree whenever we visited and even had friends mail them to us from time-to-time. I didn’t notice until about 2 years ago that Germans do sell canned pumpkin here. It’s just in chunks which I never really anticipated. Whether or not it tastes like Libby’s, I will probably never know.

Because this year, I took the big plunge and actually made my very own pumpkin puree. And I honestly cannot wait to see how the pies turn out.

Am I nervous about it? Most definitely!

But everything else I’ve made from scratch has tasted way better than the convenience food version — so I have little doubt that this will go the same way. After all, Libby’s pure pumpkin puree is merely that. So what could possibly go wrong?

This year, I grew some fabulous little pumpkins in our courtyard garden. These are something like a Baby Bear — simply described on the card when I bought the seedling as mini-pumpkins which grow to be about the size of tennis balls (although they were more like large softballs or a kid’s soccer ball) which are fantastic for pies. Needless to say, that sounded good to me!

By the way, the following process also works great for red kuri or hokkaido (very round, reddish pumpkins) which have a fantastic sweet taste. I tried this out on them first and I seriously was eating the roasted pumpkin pieces by the handful before I could get it pureed. A nice thing about them is that you don’ t have to peel the hokkaido because the skin gets very soft and edible. So you can just puree up the whole thing. But I’m not sure it would work well for pies since a traditional pumpkin puree for pies isn’t sweet on its own. So I suppose I will have to try that as a soup or maybe some pumpkin bread!

Basically, if you want to make your own pumpkin puree, you need to crack open the pumpkins (which is why small pumpkins are often better for this since they are easier to cut that the huge ones)…

scrape out the guts (don’t throw it all away though)…

cut the halves into smaller slices…

roast the pieces in the oven…

get them nice and lightly browned (about 45 minutes cooking time)…

peel the pumpkin pieces…

cut it up and puree/mash/etc…

and you’re good to go.

Looks simple enough, right? Why didn’t I do this before??

Here are the details:

First off, I’d like to say congratulations to Valerie Taylor Mabrey who was selected as the winner for the Down By the River kid’s music giveaway!

Normally, I don’t do things like this — but since it’s Thanksgiving this week and I’m feeling a bit crazy anyway, I am taking advantage of an opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up. You see, when I’m given the option to give you, my awesome readers, something back — I jump at the chance. If you’ve been hanging around NOH since early on in 2011, you know I’ve put together some pretty huge giveaway packages. And while I sometimes also get some cool swag, I also always put my readers first. So if I have an option to score something myself versus you guys getting the goodies, I’m going to give it to you. Unless maybe it’s an iPad2…or a new Canon…or some killer Tamron lenses.

At any rate, when I was asked if I wanted to host a giveaway so you could score some fabulous baking goodies, right before one of the biggest baking seasons of the year, all I could think was, “Yeah baby!”

I know not everyone is as blessed as we are to have a local mill nearby where you can still watch the tractors haul in their harvest every year. But sometimes, you don’t have to have a mill in your backyard to enjoy the benefits.

Hodgson Mill is one of the seemingly few family-owned, independent grain mills left in America. They are based in Illinois but ship their flours, pastas, bread mixes, baking mixes, breadings, gluten-free products and all sorts of other things based on grains all over the United States, Canada and even to APO’s.

The flagship products are made from high quality, stone ground grains with “just-in-time” processing — which means it’s all the freshest and best it can be. Just about anything that has grain as a basis, you will find it on the Hodgson Mill website. The array of products really is impressive, making it your one stop solution for all your grain needs.

The Hodgson family has a vision. It’s about healthy food you can feel good sharing with your family – including organic and low fat foods full of fiber and whole grain nutrition.

Wanna know something else really cool about Hodgson Mill? They are actually producing their own wind and solar to neutralize the amount of non-green energy they need to use in their production and shipping facility. I’m sure that Alva never would have imagined that was possible when he started the mill back in 1822!

If you’d like more ways to enter, hop over to the Hodgson Mill website and submit an entry to their Grain Holiday sweepstakes, where a prize package worth over $85 is up for grabs. There’s even a gluten-free option! 

 The Giveaway

Win a $25 Hodgson Mill® gift certificate to the Hodgson Mill online store which can be used on any of their fresh flours, mixes, couscous, gluten-free products or anything else on their website.

How to Enter

Main entry (required)

Open to US residents only! You must answer this first before you complete any other entries.

***What is your favorite thing to bake during the holidays?***

Additional Entries (13 extra total)

(each of these will count as one extra entry — please be sure to leave an extra comment for each one that you complete)

• “Like” NOH on Facebook or share this giveaway on Facebook
• “Like” Hodgson Mill on Facebook (leave them a little love while you’re there if you’ve got the time)
• Follow me on Twitter
• Follow Hodgson Mill on Twitter
• Follow NOH on Google follow (right side of blog — please leave your username on GFC in your comment)
• Subscribe to (and confirm your subscription to) one or both of the NOH newsletters (right side of blog)
• Retweet this giveaway (please use @txblond in your tweet) – You can retweet this daily until the contest ends, but please remember to leave a comment each day for your extra tweet. For example: Get your bake on for free! Win $25 GC for @HodgsonMillinc baking products via @txblond  http://ow.ly/7AmPx #giveaway #baking 11/20 

If you already follow, “like”, subscribe, etc. you can still count these as extra entries…you do not need to subscribe again or refollow. Just leave your comment for each entry below.

If you have questions about any of this, please just drop me an email (tiffany at noordinaryhomestead.com) or leave a comment below.

**Why so many ways to enter? By growing the following of NOH, you are helping me to let other companies know you are out there reading and participating. Acknowledging your presence helps me to secure more partnerships for the future so you have even more chances to win incredible prizes!

The contest will be open until midnight EST, Sunday, November 27th, 2011. But I may have to end this giveaway on the 22nd already — so if you’re planning to enter, do it now!

Winner Selection

One winner will be chosen via the WordPress plug And the Winner Is… .

The winner will be contacted via email and have 48 hours to respond. If I do not receive a reply, another winner will be drawn. The winner will be announced on NOH after confirmation.

Note: Opinions of this product expressed in this post are my own. I received some free flours to try out in new baking recipes but have not been compensated in any other way. The product being given away has also been provided at the cost of Hodgson Mill.

I have a confession. I’m a bit of a book junkie. I love all sorts of books that help me learn how to do things, inspire me, entertain me and teach me more about myself. One of my go-to books during the canning season is my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. It’s got over 400 recipes to help you use up all sorts of goodies from your garden and orchard.

Whether you’re just a beginner or have been canning for years, there is plenty to be learned from this book. Not only have they provided all the basic information about canning processes and how to make sure you don’t poison or kill yourself , but there are tons of tips and tricks to be learned along the way as well.

Some of the super helpful resources in the appendix include:

• The problem solver list to help you figure out where things went wrong in your canning process.
• A produce purchase guide so you know how much something weighs as well as its volume. So if you need 4 cups of jalepanos, you know that’s also 1 pound or 20 medium peppers.
• An altitude chart with information about altitudes all over the US and even a few places in Canada.

I’ve learned how to can peaches, potatoes, makes all sorts of sauces, relishes and jellies, meats and much more. All of the recipes are broken down into steps and they give ingredient measurements in both imperial and metric systems.

While I’ve come nowhere near trying all the recipes in  Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, the ones I have tried have been really good and quite easy. And I haven’t managed to make us sick even once. I highly recommend just about any book from Ball, since they are really a major authority on all things related to canning.

Pick up a copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.de.

What is your favorite canning book? Do you grow enough fruits and veggies to put some up? Or do you just try to consume everything you grow as quickly as possible?

Want to join in the garden fun and link to your own blog or images online? You can share about anything related to gardening, old or new posts, from recipes to harvesting to grow reports to DIY projects or inspiration.

Here’s how this works:

PLEASE READ THESE GUIDELINES, especially if you have never linked up before!

That’s it! Share your garden with us by linking up below!

 Long-time NOH readers will find it no surprise that we have begun really enjoying to make wine over the last 3 or 4 years. It’s not something I’ve really talked a lot about because it’s a rather involved process, and we were really still trying to learn what everything is and what it’s for. But I know that a lot of people have expressed an interest, so I thought it would be fun to put together a collection of Winemaking 101 posts.

Whenever we have a large batch of berries or even some other fruits, we consider making it into wine. Not just anything can be made into a decent wine, but we’ve been lucky to have good yields of certain things that are compatible. And it’s not that we drink all that much, but it sure is fun to do and if it turns out well, you can always give it away as presents.

In previous years, we’ve made apple wine, a gooseberry dessert wine and a few other fruit wines that turned into big fails. But this was the year when our red grapes FINALLY did not turn all moldy and gross — in fact we had a stellar harvest and will end up with about 30 liters of red wine. And it is also the year that I discovered our friends have huge batch of Riesling grapes growing in their garden, which they do absolutely nothing with. So next year, we’ll be looking forward to drinking some of our own whites (at least 3 months resting period) and reds (at least a year to wait).

But before I go off on a tangent about how to make some of the particular wines we’ve done, I figured it would first be prudent to actually show you the tools needed to get started with wine making. The Intro to Winemaking 101 if you will.

There are a quite a few tools and things one needs. Here in Germany, you can sometimes find people getting rid of their entire collection of wine balloons, press, corker, whatevers all at once. It’s often because someone is now too old to make the wine or younger people realized they really had no interest in the first place. So we have quite a collection of wine balloons and fermentation barrels which came with our house, from about 5 liters to around 50. And we have bought a lot of other things new because we had no other choice.

The items you use for wine making may look slightly different, and the investment cost can vary greatly since you may be able to pick up some things used — although do be careful about asking what it might have been used for in the past — you don’t want to age a wine in something that used to hold chemicals. The good news is that most of it lasts roughly forever, unless you happy to crack a glass balloon (which so far has only happened to us once – *knocking on wood*).

For starters, you are going to need some sort of fermentation barrels, glass jars and balloons. For the must at the beginning (the very first stage of fermentation), it’ s best to have something dark in color so that what is inside doesn’t start to react or mold due to the light. The black barrel you see below is a just that, and it has a two part lid. The first piece is flat and fits snugly onto the barrel. The second is a tightening ring that screws on. If you’re familiar with canning in Ball jars, it’s very much like that — just way bigger and plastic.

You crush your fruit as you dump it in there, add some anti-gelling powder (which helps the fruit break down so the juices can be released) and then let it work through the first phase. The time frame differs based on the type of fruit or grapes used. You may also want a Hydrometer or Öchsle scale and tall, narrow beaker at this stage to check the sugar levels in the fruit, but we rarely get that scientific about it.

Now you will want to press the wine. In addition to the wine press, you’re going to need a funnel, a wine balloon or barrel (these can be clear), something to scoop the fermented fruit out of the barrel and into the press, a bucket to throw the pressed skins into (we usually toss this right into the compost bin) and a staggered working space to make this all function smoothly.

The wine press allows you to get all of the juice out of your grapes or fruit without having to stomp on it. When it comes to presses, bigger is almost always better. In our experience, our press gets the job done at about 10 liters per pressing. That may not sound too bad — but when you’re pressing 30, 50 or even 100 liters or wine, it becomes tedious. And you want the process to move as quickly as possible to keep fruit flies and other bugs out. Any contamination will take your wine to vinegar — or just nothing useful at all.

Once you’ve pressed the wine, you will let it sit again and the sediment inside will settle. The next most important thing in winemaking 101 is a fermentation bell. This is basically an airlock that sits on top of your fermentation container and allows the air created during the fermentation process to escape, but keeps bugs and other creatures from getting. This gives you a bit of peace of mind that the work you are doing to make wine will achieve good results. You can use some cotton stuffed into the top of your container or cover it with plastic. But in our experience, the plastic wrap gets holes poked in it by tiny fingers, and the cotton may also fall into the container — and if you don’t notice soon enough, your whole batch could be ruined.

Our recent batch of white wine which was especially active during the initial phases, hence all the foam.

As you’ll notice, we also have some rubber nipples that fit over our wine balloons (when we’re lucky), and there is a hole in top for the bell. Fermentation bells may be glass or plastic, but they function in much the same way. The problem we’ve had with the plastic ones is that the two pieces tend to get separated or opened by tiny hands (winemaking with a toddler or younger is quite an experience) and then your wine is again at risk.

Once you’ve let everything settle for the first go round, you’re going to need to pull out the funnel again, grab another balloon or jug and find a siphon. You need to siphon off the wine from the sediment, because if you leave the wine together with the impurities too long, it will start to taste bitter. So the key is to disturb the wine as little as possible when you move it — and not dip the siphon down too far into the wine so the yucky stuff stays put.

You will also need a funnel here and some sort of filter. This could be a cheese cloth, a fruit sieve, muslin cloth, coffee filters — whatever you have that will keep the sediment, seeds and other things from going back into your wine.

You put the wine back into a big balloon, add your chemicals (which could be yeasts, tannins, acids or other things) and let the fermentation continue. Usually you want the whole batch to fit in one container, with just a bit of space at the top so the wine has space to work. Some may want to try to skip the chemicals, but you will end up with a better quality wine if you just buy them and use them. And you really don’t need so many things. The yeast is probably the most important — so if you only go for one thing, get that. Although we have had wine made without any chemicals (and it’s fantastic) an inexperienced winemaker is likely going to have trouble getting the results they want at first without these helpers.

After the wine has worked and is read for bottling. You will need empty wine bottles and some sort of lids. You can get screw-ons or corks from plastic, real cork or even glass. In the instance of the first two corks, you’ll probably also want a corking gun to make the process go much more smoothly. Another option is using plastic bag in a box packaging. We were able to find a supplier for them here in Germany and we often use them for fruit juices we make and pasteurize before bagging. We haven’t used them for wine since we only have 3- and 5-liter bags — but I’m sure one could if you drink large quantities of wine within a few weeks time.

So there you have it — the basic tools of Winemaking 101. Hopefully you’ve learned something new and interesting…and I’m looking forward to sharing more about our wine experiences with you in the coming weeks!

Have you ever made your own wine? How did it go?

If you’re just learning about this for the first time, what questions do you have that you’d love answered?

Want to join in the garden fun and link to your own blog or images online? You can share about anything related to gardening, old or new posts, from recipes to harvesting to grow reports to DIY projects or inspiration.

Here’s how this works:

PLEASE READ THESE GUIDELINES, especially if you have never linked up before!

That’s it! Share your garden with us by linking up below!

The berry season is winding down here and I happened to pick up some really gorgeous late season strawberries last week, which have now just been sitting in our fridge because my plans to make something with them over the weekend didn’t pan out. So I decided to make them into sorbet, as I did a few weeks ago with very tasty results.

This recipe makes a sweet berry sorbet with a bit of a punch (depending on the amount of sugar you use and the tartness of your limes. It’s a great summer sorbet, and we really enjoyed it in combination with freshly canned peaches as dessert, but you could combine it with all sorts of other berries or fruits.

I love this sorbet because it’s just so incredibly easy to make, yet so delicious. And people seem to think you’ve gone out of your way to make something difficult despite this being so simple (especially thanks to an electric ice cream machine!)

What’s your favorite kind of sorbet??

Do you ever have those moments in the morning or middle of the day (or even right before dinner should be served) when you just can’t get yourself to feel inspired in the kitchen? You’re sick of the old stand-by recipes and you just don’t have the time or energy to seek out something new and interesting — so you end up going out to dinner, picking up some fast food or ordering in, which usually costs a small fortune and often isn’t all that healthy for you.

But what if you knew there was a way to feel more inspired about what you’re putting on the table, you’d never have to search for new meals again, dinner could be mad quickly and you could even save money doing it? You could sit down after cooking a great meal and actually be able to concentrate on enjoying the meal with your family and connecting with each other? What if I told you, that could all be a reality for a mere $5 a month?

Today I’d like to introduce a service I not only think is brilliant but that also has some really fantastic recipes in the repertoire!

E-Mealz began in 2003 when a mother of four, Jane DeLaney, began setting out to fill a need in her own life and the lives of others. Her daily schedule was packed and she’d made several attempts at meal planning, but nothing ever really stuck (and anyone who’s tried meal planning knows it’s not all that easy). She really wanted something that not only provided recipes that were healthy and delicious (and which her kids would eat) but that also would not cost a fortune. The ideal service would also take advantage of coupons, local specials at grocery chains and include a complete shopping list for the week. And from that, E-Mealz was born.

Jane and her sister, Jenny, run E-Mealz together and have found that parents fall into two categories:

1. Those who did not grow up with family dinnertime and therefore don’t have a vision for what it can be, or
2. Those who did grow up with family dinnertime, but since current lifestyles are so busy and fragmented, struggle to duplicate their childhood experience and pull it off for their own families.

And although Stefan and I often eat together, I rarely have dinner on the table when he gets home just because it’s not all that convenient. Mackenzie goes to bed at about the time that he walks in the door, so we don’t eat until she’s already in bed. But on the weekends, we do our best to eat as a family for almost all of our meals, just because it’s so much more enjoyable, especially as Mack gets older.

Why Use E-Mealz

One of the things I really like about their program is not only that the recipes are well thought out and easy, or even that they have a complete shopping list broken down to include what section of the store the items are coming from and what staples you probably have on your list. What I love is the number of different sorts of plans they have.

There are gluten free, vegetarian and portion control options…and the one I really love is low carb. When Stefan and I started our low carb diet a couple months ago (which we have been off for a bit but hope to get back on sometime soon since we’d definitely noticing the carb peaks again), I was really struggling to find recipes that were suitable for the meals. The E-Mealz recipes in the low carb meal plan option not only sound great, but they fit into that diet with very little tweaking which I was fairly impressed about.

Now if only they’ve offer some breakfast and lunch options too… not that you can’t have a lot of these for lunch as well. It’s just that when you’re eating every4 hours like we were doing on the 4-Hour Body, you get a bit stumped with what to eat from time to time.

Find out what sort of meal plans they offer that will fit your family’s lifestyle and download a free sample meal plan.

Join the Family Fun

September 25th has been declared National Family Day in the United States — and E-Mealz is celebrating their second Family Celebration Week, from September 26- 30. Whether you are a single parent, a roommate, or a family of five, this week is about celebrating those bonds with your own family, whatever structure or size it may take on.

The theme this year is “Proud to Be a Family”, and E-Mealz has crafted many free activities and clever ways to bring your family closer.  So join in as they travel through creative family dinners and snacks, fun-filled activities and enjoy strengthening the bonds with the ones you love the most.  Building family and community is a priority of the E-Mealz family and they pride themselves on encouraging families all across the country to come together and strengthen bonds while enjoying the one thing we all have in common…food.

Your upcoming chance to win!

I’m proud to have E-Mealz as one of the sponsors of the Refueling Power Moms giveaway, October 6-10. Two lucky winners (one in the US and one in Europe) will get the chance to enjoy a 3-month subscription to E-Mealz for free! Be sure to follow me on Facebook, via the RSS feed, email (use the forms on the right sidebar) or Twitter so you don’t miss out on the great prize packages, worth over $700!!

So as not to overwhelm you in my discussion about peaches, I thought I would share the basic canning peaches recipe today instead of last Friday when it was peach chaos. Of course that peach explosion was nothing like having 100 pounds of peaches sitting in front of you at once. And I promise you that after 14 hours of canning peaches in syrup, you start to get a little loopy. But hey, we pulled through. And we have 44 quart/liter jars of peaches to show for it!

In fact, we started eating some of them already, because a few of the jars wouldn’t seal, and they are delicious. I served some up on Saturday night with homemade strawberry-raspberry-lime sorbet which complemented each other perfectly.

While we were canning, I really wanted to be conscious about waste. So I made sure to grab any juices that leaked out in bowls between the blanching and pitting phases, and poured it all into a pitcher in the end. This also helped to keep our work area far cleaner — because there are few things worse than cleaning up super sticky peach juice that is just everywhere. We mixed this in with iced tea to make our own peach iced tea….and I’ve used it with some of the canned peaches to make popsicles for Mackenzie. She loves them!

The following recipe is also from my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving which has also sorts of basic and more advanced info about canning. It’s great for anyone just getting started or those who have been doing this for a while and just want some new ideas. You can find information about how to can just about anything under the sun straight — or combine it with other goodness to make one of the many sauces, jellies or pickles inside.

Because peaches contain a lot of air in their juicy cell structure, hot packing is usually recommended. It allows some of the air to be removed before they are packed in the jars. We started our canning using the hot pack method and just found it to be too time consuming, especially because we only have 2 burners in our canning kitchen, thus making it difficult to peel and pack at the same time, while canning. We can’t tell the difference between the jars but think that the peaches done with the raw-pack method likely ended up being a lot less mushy. Perhaps with large peaches, it would be another story.

When you’ve got tons of peaches and tomatoes…and nearly as many apples to match, this fruit ketchup is a pretty good way to get rid of them fast. It tastes a lot like a sweet and sour sauce, and tastes fantastic on chicken nuggets or chicken burgers…or even french fries.

This recipe is a bit time consuming because you need to press the pulp through a sieve and cook the ketchup down. But it’s totally worth it. And you’ll end up with a bunch of pulp when you’re done that is still quite moist but doesn’t have enough juice left to contribute to the ketchup. I decided to use that in batches of meaty spaghetti sauce and chili which turned out really nicely. The flavor was very noticeable in the meat sauce, possibly because I threw it in with the beginning and fried it a bit. But in the chili, it’s just a bit of fruit/veggie filler with no change in the flavor at all. You can also use any juice/pulp that you end up leftover with into sauces since you’re supposed to use only 5 cups when creating the rest of the recipe.

This recipe is out of my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving which is a great source of canning knowledge for both experienced and unexperienced canners. Not only does it include all the basics like canning straight fruit and veggies, but also tons of salsas, relishes, chutneys, condiments, pickles, jams and more.