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:

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!

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.

There is a true art to making fruit salad on the fly. In the last year, I have made more huge bowls of fruit salad than I have ever made (o even eaten) in my life. A fruit salad is by no means complicated to make; you only need to be able to cut up a ton of fruit into bite size pieces. And it’s a great way to encourage kids (and adults) to eat more fruit. I often make fruit salad when certain fruits have been in our fridge for a while and just aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Most fruits I love by themselves — but there is something really special about the variety available in fruit salad that makes any old fruit more interesting

When you’re throwing together fruit salad with whatever you have around, you’ve got to create careful balance of fruits as well as consider the colors you’re using. There are few things more tasty than pineapple and mango mixed together — but it looks a little boring when you get down to it. Throwing in berries, watermelon, or red grapes will help make things a bit more lively. You can put just about any fruit into a fruit salad, from papaya to apples to bananas. So will hold up for a few days (apples) while others are better when added right before the fruit salad is eaten (bananas).

Fruit salad is also quite versatile. It can be easily taken along in lunches or used as a snack during the day. You can also toss a handful of fruit salad int0 your cereal in the morning or top off a bowl of fruit salad with yogurt and granola for a nice crunch. By the way, none of these things are slow carb friendly and I’m having fruit cravings just thinking about all this, but I’ve also knocked my body fat down about 6% in just 3 weeks so I’m not going to totally give up on the lifestyle just yet.

All you need to do with each fruit is cut it up until it’s bite-size (and remove any seeds or peel as necessary) — then throw it all into a bowl, mix it together and big in! The key is putting just about the same amount of each fruit into the bowl. For example:

• 1/2 large mango
• 1/3-1/2 pineapple (we can never have too much pineapple in ours)
• 1 apple
• 1 small bunch of grapes (about a fistful)
• 2 kiwis
• 1/4 cantaloupe or honey dew
• 1/2 pint strawberries or other berries
• 1 orange
• 1/4 of a small round watermelon

Here’s a few of our favorite fruit salad combinations.  So far, no combination we’ve made has ever turned out bad. So just try it out with whatever you have in your fridge!

• Mango, pineapple, strawberry, apple, oranges
• Mango, pineapple, red grape, banana
• Grape, apple, cantaloupe, orange
• Watermelon, mango, pineapple, strawberry

These potatoes are always a big hit when we grill steaks. Add a salad and you’ve got a great meal. Unfortunately, they are completely not allowed on our slow carb diet (except for cheat days). So for those living it up every day, you’re going to love these potatoes. I stole the recipe from my mother-in-law who has often served these on grill nights at their place. So yummy!

What I love about this recipe is that this side dish is so simple to make. And you can even prep it early on in the evening and just pop it into the oven while firing up the charcoal. Then you’re free to tend to other things like entertaining guests or enjoying a glass of wine until they’re ready.

You can really customize these oven roasted potatoes by adding any herbs and spices you’d like. Add a bit of chili, paprika or parsley…whatever your heart desires!

Simple Oven Roasted Potatoes

Serves 2

Ingredients

• 8-10 small potatoes
• A few tablespoons Olive Oil in a shallow bowl
• Sea salt
• 4 sprigs fresh thyme
• 1 sprig fresh rosemary
• Other spices you choose

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400°F (200°F).
2. Scrub potatoes.
3. Cut in half lengthwise.
4. Place flat, inner side down into olive oil briefly to coat. Place inner side up on baking sheet.
5. Sprinkle all with sea salt. Add fresh herbs or other spices.
6. Roast in middle of oven for 45-60 minutes, until a fork easily pierces the potato and the tops become slightly browned.