A Baking Marathon with Zucchini Mama at Simon Fraser
Special thanks to Choices Market on Cambie for donating fresh, quality ingredients!
This week we Division 3 baked with the Curcurbit family. No, the cucurbits are not the quirky next door neighbors, they are a family of squash, including zucchini, which is a summer squash and pumpkin, which is a winter squash. Cooking with squash adds fiber and nutrients to your baked goods and has the added benefit of lending moisture and flavor to the recipe. Our local zucchini season is pretty much over so be sure to have one last go at adding them to salads or cupcakes. Leaving the skin on adds extra fiber to the recipe. Chef Renie Zucchini and Chef Coco made a delicious Apple Zucchini Salad with an apple cider vinaigrette. They worked with E W, patiently cutting up the ingredients into pretty, uniform pieces, making the salad look as good as it tasted. Chocolate Discovery Man made my favorite Chocolate Zucchini Cupcakes from the popular rebar cookbook. S and N made Zucchini Cupcakes with the addition of chocolate chips. As Jamie Oliver would say, zucchini and chocolate are best mates! I liked this recipe because the product is moist, light, and incredibly easy to make. It is the perfect bake sale recipe.
Every Saturday this winter we are lucky to have a winter farmer's market at Nat Bailey Stadium. Every week I look for the last sugar pumpkins of the season. These pumpkins are especially good for baking because the flesh is dense and tasty. I found a sugar pumpkin on sale for just two dollars, so I took out the seeds, cut it in half and rubbed it with sunflower oil. I baked it until it was soft and the skin started to separate from the pulp. This yielded about 3 1/2 cups of pulp, which is a good deal, considering that a 15 oz. can of organic pumpkin (about 2 cups) is about 3 dollars or more. Chef Death rolled out a pie crust which the students cut into circles for tarts. Chef Lemon Head made the filling for my favorite (Zucchini Mama's Awesome) Pumpkin Pie recipe, which is sweetened with maple syrup. Chef Lemon Head's secret is to put some freshly grated lemon rind in the pie filling to give it some extra zing.
Next, we had Luchandor, Mr Chef and J make another pumpkin pie recipe which is sweetened with honey. We used buckwheat honey for a deep, rich flavor. The honey, and the fact that we used some canned pumpkin made a darker tart. Both recipes tasted sweet and rich. I hadn't made enough pie crust so we used some silicon muffin cups to bake the rest pf the filling which worked just fine (and saves on calories). Silicon muffin cups are a worthwhile investment because it saves you from buying boxes of cupcake papers. They'd make an awesome Christmas present for the baker in your family! It is recommended you season the liners with a bit of vegetable oil the first two or three times you use them to prevent the cupcakes from sticking.
Special thanks to Choices Market on Cambie for donating fresh, quality ingredients!
This week we Division 3 baked with the Curcurbit family. No, the cucurbits are not the quirky next door neighbors, they are a family of squash, including zucchini, which is a summer squash and pumpkin, which is a winter squash. Cooking with squash adds fiber and nutrients to your baked goods and has the added benefit of lending moisture and flavor to the recipe. Our local zucchini season is pretty much over so be sure to have one last go at adding them to salads or cupcakes. Leaving the skin on adds extra fiber to the recipe. Chef Renie Zucchini and Chef Coco made a delicious Apple Zucchini Salad with an apple cider vinaigrette. They worked with E W, patiently cutting up the ingredients into pretty, uniform pieces, making the salad look as good as it tasted. Chocolate Discovery Man made my favorite Chocolate Zucchini Cupcakes from the popular rebar cookbook. S and N made Zucchini Cupcakes with the addition of chocolate chips. As Jamie Oliver would say, zucchini and chocolate are best mates! I liked this recipe because the product is moist, light, and incredibly easy to make. It is the perfect bake sale recipe.
Every Saturday this winter we are lucky to have a winter farmer's market at Nat Bailey Stadium. Every week I look for the last sugar pumpkins of the season. These pumpkins are especially good for baking because the flesh is dense and tasty. I found a sugar pumpkin on sale for just two dollars, so I took out the seeds, cut it in half and rubbed it with sunflower oil. I baked it until it was soft and the skin started to separate from the pulp. This yielded about 3 1/2 cups of pulp, which is a good deal, considering that a 15 oz. can of organic pumpkin (about 2 cups) is about 3 dollars or more. Chef Death rolled out a pie crust which the students cut into circles for tarts. Chef Lemon Head made the filling for my favorite (Zucchini Mama's Awesome) Pumpkin Pie recipe, which is sweetened with maple syrup. Chef Lemon Head's secret is to put some freshly grated lemon rind in the pie filling to give it some extra zing.
Next, we had Luchandor, Mr Chef and J make another pumpkin pie recipe which is sweetened with honey. We used buckwheat honey for a deep, rich flavor. The honey, and the fact that we used some canned pumpkin made a darker tart. Both recipes tasted sweet and rich. I hadn't made enough pie crust so we used some silicon muffin cups to bake the rest pf the filling which worked just fine (and saves on calories). Silicon muffin cups are a worthwhile investment because it saves you from buying boxes of cupcake papers. They'd make an awesome Christmas present for the baker in your family! It is recommended you season the liners with a bit of vegetable oil the first two or three times you use them to prevent the cupcakes from sticking.
M "Biscuit" C made a scent diffuser by pushing whole cloves into the lid of a pumpkin we'd hollowed out and made square-shaped widows in. She rubbed pumpkin pie spices into the flesh of the pumpkin and put a tea light in the bottom. As the spices warmed up, it filled the room with a lovely aroma. This is an idea from our old friend Martha Stewart. (BTW, I ended up removing the top of the pumpkin because it was so small that the lid started to burn, so if you're using a small pumpkin, just leave off the top.) Next, Mercedes covered the pumpkin seeds with oil and sprinkled them with sugar and baked them at 250 F until they were toasted. (We later cut up the pumpkin diffuser and baked it to use in a recipe.)
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