Guess what Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) has to say about November. Just guess.
The answer is absolutely nothing. The book ends at October because that's when the garden stops producing new crops and the gardener is ready to stop thinking about gardening for a while. I wanted to make the book last for a full year, though, so I held back some recipes for fall crops that can usually be stored and used into late fall and early winter, like turnips. Anybody up for Turnips in Custard?
There are no measurements for the sugar and seasonings, so you can make it as dessert-ish as you want.
If that's not your style, there's a recipe for a somewhat more traditional pairing of pumpkin and custard.
So-- pretty close to pumpkin pie without the crust, and with the fancy of step of being flambéed at the end.
If you really want a pie, the chapter offers a Hubbard Squash Pie.
This made me think of grandma, who always explained that she made her "pumpkin" pies out of squashes she'd grown in the garden, puréed, and frozen to use later. (I'm not really sure whether they were Hubbard squashes, though! She never said. I always assumed it was acorn squash for some reason, but I'm actually not sure... Could have been butternut or something else. We weren't usually visiting when she was harvesting the squashes.)
Or if you prefer to fiddle around with individual servings (because November is a good month for baking and surely you're not too busy!), there's a recipe for Pumpkin Tarts.
I was not aware ginger marmalade existed, but it sounds like a lovely addition to the bottom of a pumpkin tart!
No matter what you choose from this assortment of recipes, though, you're sure to get a blast of sweet, warm fall spices. Every day can taste like Thanksgiving, whether you want it to or not.
At least we can taste fall even if it doesn't feel like fall. Okay, technically the high today is below 60 degrees. That means that I opened my windows today instead of running the air conditioner (but I still have one neighbor running their air because I heard their unit cycle on and off all day while I was working).
ReplyDeleteI also find it interesting that she stopped in the fall when the book started out before things were really growing yet. I guess that she was tired of the garden and all the work, so wanted to take a couple of months off for the holidays before planning her next garden. I do always say that the junk food season starts with Halloween and goes through to the beginning of January.
Yes, I thought it was odd that the book started before there was much of anything growing or even anything to start planting, but it ended right with the harvest (and probably before the harvest is even fully over). It does seem kind of like the author just got sick of writing and stopped.
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