Happy Halloween!

I wish I could report some fabulous Halloween meal or dessert yummy I made to honor this most fabulous of holidays, Gentle Reader, but I didn't do that. The boys feasted on blorfilicious 50-cent corndogs at Sonic for supper and had leftovers for lunch. Yep, we did this holiday up right!

Then again, we had to converse our energy for the costumed affair. Looking this good takes a lot of effort!

Happy Halloween Eve

Is your costume all ready, Gentle Reader? Have the 15 pounds of candy purchased for the sugar-seeking hordes of all ages?

If you're not all abuzz with Halloween goodness, need some last-minute costume ideas or just want to coo over some photos of an adorable kid, then sit back and enjoy the show.

Eat Your Heart Out, Papa Murphy's

About the only time I see "normal" broadcast television programming is when I'm running at the gym between those family-friendly hours of 7 and 10 a.m. The national morning news/infotainment programs of the former Big 3 are as incredibly inane as ever, nor have the commercials really changed since the time I was a kid. "Convenience" is the label they give so many of the products advertised, and now that no one apparently cooks from scratch, the morning commercials love to flog the latest in convenience, "almost homemade!" meals.

Thus we get from Papa Murphy's the jack-o-lantern pizza for the low, low price of $6.99. (At least that's the price in the Central Texas market.) Nothing says Halloween like a crappy pizza with oily cheese, oily pepperoni and a token pair of black olives. Woo-woo.

Yeah, I figured the boys would love it.

But there's no way I'm paying $6.99 for something anyone with a few functional brain cells can do. Someone with a whole lot of functional brain cells and a penchant for getting crafty can really improve on this concept. See what I mean:

Now that's a pumpkin pie!

Seriously, when I get this crafty, I kind of make myself sick. And with pepperoni of all things....

I have to admit that I'm rather impressed my improvised pita stem browned nicely in the oven to look even more like a stem. I didn't expect the cheese to run everywhere since it's low-fat cheese and typically doesn't do that, but I was nevertheless pleased that Pumpkin Face didn't come out looking like Pizza the Hut:

Squashed

Although our unseasonable fall-like weather has been replaced by the higher temperatures and higher humidity we're more accustomed to in October, I've found myself enchanted by the fruits of the fall harvest. Seeing all those apples on display at HEB and Sprouts is such a delight, and the price for eggplants has come down. Autumn's so much more colorful and so much more appetizing.

Out of sheer curiosity, fond remembrances of a soup I had while at a yoga teacher training retreat 7 years ago (yegods, has it really been 7 years?) and a growing desire to try using my tagine on the stove top along with the diffuser plate I'd bought for that express purpose, I bought a butternut squash. Not only are butternut squash chocked full of all kinds of healthful benefits, but their unique shape just begs for all sorts of off-color jokes about phalli. Would this innocent-looking squash be my undoing? I honestly didn't know.

With the butternut squash purchased, I obviously had to figure out how to prepare it for use in the chicken-butternut tagine recipe I planned to use it in. I'd seen an acorn squash prepared--with the use of a cleaver and hammer--on America's Test Kitchen some time before, but my little squash only weighed about a pound and a half. It was no behemoth and certainly, I hoped, wouldn't not require me to use implements we keep in the garage in the toolbox.

Instead of turning to one of my Cook's Illustrated references, I turned instead to Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. Ms. Jaffrey straightforward guidance filled me with confidence that I wouldn't be reaching for a sledgehammer or be putting my much-hated country blue kitchen countertops at risk in the preparation of the squash. Armed with just my beloved Victorinox chef's knife and a cutting board, I got down to business.

Although pumpkins and butternut squash are in the same family, so to speak, carving up my butternut was a whole lot easier than carving up a pumpkin for a jack-o-lantern. Or at least the specimen I had to work with was, for it hardly had many seeds and not a lot of that stringy, sticky, fibrous "guts" to scoop out. Peeling it was a breeze too: I used a combination of a basic veggie peeler and my chef's knife.

Given that this task was brand new to me, I was quite proud to have the squash halved vertically, cleaned, cut into portions, peeled and then cubed and parceled out into an appropriate amount for the tagine and into two freezer bags of similar portions for later use all within 30 minutes or so. Well, at least I don't think that's too bad for a first-timer.

With the big prep task out of the way, I moved on to the actual making 'o the tagine.

Chicken-butternut Tagine1 T olive oil
2 C chopped onion
2 t ground cumin
1 t paprika
1 t ground turmeric
1/4 t salt
1/4 t ground cinnamon
1/4 t ground ginger
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 lb. skinless, boneless chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces
2 C fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
8 oz. peeled, cubed butternut squash
1/3 C halved pitted picholine olives (about 3 oz.)
8 pitted dried plums, chopped
Fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves (optional)

1. Heat oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat.
   
2. Add the onion and cook 8 min. or until golden, stirring occasionally.
   
3. Stir in cumin, paprika, turmeric, cinnamon, ginger, salt, garlic and chicken, and then cook 1 min., stirring constantly.
   
4. Stir in broth, squash, olives and dried plums.
   
5. Bring the mixture to a boil, cover, reduce heat to medium-low and then simmer 10 min. or until squash is tender.
   
6. Garnish with parsley, if desired.

Yield: 4 servings of 1 1/4 C each

Nutritional Info
Calories: 309
Fat: 8.8 g
Sat fat: 0.9 g
Protein: 29.8 g
Carbs: 29.7 g
Fiber: 5.2 g
Cholesterol: 66 mg
Sodium: 782 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
I'll say this right off, Gentle Reader: I got way too wrapped up in preparing the squash right. How ridiculous is it that I was so worried about that? Well, I did. So much so that I made some goofs with the recipe. Oh well.

• I failed to remember the salt until well after I'd added the broth and squash. D'oh!
  
• I failed to remember the turmeric until today when I was transcribing the recipe. Sheesh, that's really pathetic.
  
• I didn't use that tablespoon of olive oil called for by the recipe. Maybe a teaspoon and a half did the trick.
  
• I don't do olives. Even the smell of them turns my stomach, thus I have to give a wide berth to the olive bars at various grocery stores around Austin lest I ralph right then and there.
  
• While I do have prunes, I didn't feel this recipe would be served well by them. I've made a Moroccan dish or two with them, and they impart an interesting taste that...well, it's not terribly satisfying for me. I instead used dried cranberries, tossing an amount that I thought was equivalent to the prunes and the olives.
  
• Because I didn't have enough squash to for three 8-ounce freezer bags, I tossed in an extra 3 ounces or so. Did that lead to overcrowding? I don't think so.
  
• I used my tagine to prepare the dish rather than Chive the Dutchie because the recipe's called a tagine.
  
• I doubled the simmering time on the advice of some of the recipe reviews so that the squash would indeed be tender.

My nerves were a bit overwrought not just from working with the squash but also from using the tagine on the stovetop for the first time. It performs beautifully in the oven, but I had my doubts about the diffuser's ability to evenly and adequately heat the bottom bowl of the tagine. I'm not sure if those doubts were well-founded or not because it seemed to take forever for the olive oil to heat up. In fact, it wasn't anywhere near warm enough when I tossed in the onions to brown. I had to keep the burner heat turned up fairly high for most of the cooking time, which I really didn't like. That strikes me as inefficient. That said, though, I did have to turn down the heat substantially about 10 minutes into the simmering time because liquid was starting to bubble out from beneath the chimney lid, which isn't as tight-fitting as a traditional pot lid.

The finished tagine dish was quite tasty, although I wonder now what it would be like if I'd remembered the turmeric.
The squash did come out quite tender, and I tried to induce the boy into eating it by letting him know it tasted very close to potatoes. (He had maybe two or three cubes and that was it.) I served the finished yumminess atop pistachio couscous, but I think it would have been better served with plain couscous or with a side of pita with which to sop up the liquid. That's not a knock against either the pistachio couscous or the finished tagine; The wonderful flavor and aroma of the couscous was lost, buried under the flavors of the tagine.

Battle of the Bread Machines, Day 7

As promised, here's the husband with the latest installment of the Battle of the Bread Machines.

--The Faudie
Yes, I know we haven't played this game lately. But you don't think we'd be continuing our little bread machine contest unless we had a really good reason to, do you?

Well, we do.

Competitor #7: The Zojirushi Model BBCC-X20

The Faudie has already profiled today's contestant, the Zojirushi BBCC-X20. Go ahead and read her post about this double-paddled lil' wonder. All that I can to add to what she's written is: A $240 bread machine for $14? Daaaaaaaaaaaamn. Thank you, Goodwill! From out of nowhere, the Zo has become the machine to beat in this competition.

Anxious to get started with the Zo, I didn't spend a lot of time deciding what kind of bread to make. I just went with the first reasonable recipe I came across, which happened to be:

Homestyle Whole Wheat Bread

1 1/2 C water
3 C whole wheat bread flour
heaped 3/4 C white bread flour
1 1/2 t salt
2 t sugar
2 T butter, diced
1 t instant dry yeast

1. Add ingredients to machine according to manufacturer's directions.
   
2. Use Whole Wheat or Multigrain setting, if available.
   

Yield: 1 lb. loaf

Nutritional Info
This particular recipe came from Anne Sheasby's The Bread Machine Bible, which has the Donna Rathmell Germanesque quality of not including nutritional information.

The Husband's Futzings
None to report other than the addition of three teaspoons of vital gluten.

As The Faudie mentioned in her post, our Zo came complete with its original instruction manual (helpfully titled "How To Enjoy Your Home Bakery Supreme"), and thank goodness it did. The BBCC-X20 is capable of a lot, but it's almost impossible to use the controls using intuition alone. For example, to bypass the preheat process, you have to press the "TIME" and "CYCLE" buttons at the same time for three seconds. I can safely say I wouldn't have known that without having the manual on hand.

Official Results for Competitor #7
I'm guessing there's a reason Zojirushi bread machines sell for north of $200, and that reason is because they're awesome. Don't believe me? Just take a look at the loaf of homestyle whole wheat our Zo produced.

The Zo made it so.

The loaf came out perfectly cooked, the crust was the right darkness...I even love the shape of the loaf, which simply looks more "bread-like" than the carbohydrate cubes most of our other machines produce. I couldn't have asked for more. (Since then, I've also used the Zo to prepare a sourdough pizza crust, and the machine continued to perform like a champ.)

By now, we've tested a lot of different appliances over the course of the Battle of the Bread Machines, some of which have found a permanent home in our kitchen. But the Zo has jumped to the front of the pack. I'd hate to think this is the end of our competition, but I have a hard time believing we're going to find a bread machine better than the BBCC-X20.

And yes, it scores extra points for being a $240 machine picked up for just $14. (When was the last time you got a 94% discount on anything?)

It only cost us $7 a paddle!

Gross-out Halloween Foods

Ever been to a haunted house or some other Halloween event at which were on display for your tactile and visual delight an assortment of fiendish foods? Platters of cold cooked spaghetti masquerading as intestines or worms? Severed finger sandwiches? Jell-o mold brains?

Well, I don't think this recipe for individual baked eggs is intended to be a Halloween gross-out food, but the picture sure makes it a prime candidate for your next Halloween party!


Mmmm...nothing says Halloween yumminess like a gouged-out eyeball wrapped in muscle and viscera and resting on...a cheese-covered English muffin.