Pumpkin Pie

  Anna Olson's Pumpkin Pie

Every year an essential part of our Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas dinner is pumpkin pie with homemade whipped cream.  Anna Olson's recipe for Pumpkin Pie has become on of my most favorites.  As you prepare for your shopping this week, I thought I'd post the recipe so you can plan for the ingredients.

 

Courtesy of:  Anna Olson - Bake With Anna Olson - THE FOOD NETWORK

Recipe summary

I find that a whole wheat pie dough makes for a crust that browns nicely and stays crispy under the pumpkin filling, and the subtly nutty taste really works well with the autumn filling.

Makes 1 9-inch pie

Preparation time: approx 30 min, plus chilling time for dough.
Cooking time: 10 min + 35 - 40 min
Yield: 8

Ingredients

Crust

3/4 cup whole wheat flour (all-purpose)
3/4 cup cake and pastry flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
10 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces and then frozen for 10 minutes
1 large egg yolk
3 tablespoons cold water
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Filling

2 cups pumpkin puree
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
3 large eggs
3/4 cup evaporated milk
1 1/2 teaspoons finely grated fresh ginger
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 egg whisked with 2 tbsp water, for brushing

Assembly

Directions - for crust, filling and assembly.

1. Pulse the flours, sugar and salt to combine in a food processor (or the dough can be prepared by hand or using a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment). Add the butter and pulse it in quick pulses until just small pieces of butter are visible and the mixture as a whole just begins to take on a pale yellow colour (indicating that the butter has been worked in).
2. Stir the egg yolk, water and lemon juice together and add this to the dough all at once, pulsing until the dough barely comes together (it should look like a crumble dough). Shape the dough into a disc by hand, wrap and chill for at least 2 hours before rolling. Alternatively, the dough can be frozen for up to 3 months and thawed in the fridge before rolling.
3. On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough to just under a ¼ inch thick. Lightly dust a 9-inch pie plate (do not grease) and line the plate with the pastry, Trim the pastry off right to the edge of the pie plate and press it down gently to secure. Reserve any remaining dough for trim and chill it and the pie shell while preparing the filling.
4. Preheat the oven to 400 F.
5. Whisk the pumpkin purée, brown sugar and eggs together, then whisk in the evaporated milk, ginger, cinnamon, clove and salt. Pour this into the chilled pie shell.
6. To create the trim, roll out the remaining pie dough into a long rectangle and cut into strips about 1/3-inch wide. Braid three strips together, gently pulling the dough a little to stretch it as you braid it. You may have to make a few braids to cover the complete edge of the pie. Lightly brush the edge of the pie dough and place the braided dough overtop, lightly pressing. Brush the braid(s) with eggwash.
7. Place the pie onto a baking tray and bake the pie for 10 minutes at 400 F, then reduce the oven temperature to 375 F and bake the pie for another 35 to 40 minutes, until the pumpkin filling is set, but still has a little jiggle to it in the centre. Cool the pie to room temperature, then chill completely, about 4 hours, before serving.
The pie is best served chilled, and can be stored, refrigerated, for up to 2 days.

Yum!  Very delicious.  ENJOY!

Thanks for reading,

Cassie

Rustic Fall Bouquet

We had company from Australia this weekend.
My Mother is Australian, and we have LOTS of family in Melbourne and it's surrounding area.  I have never had the priveledge to go to Australia, but maybe one day I will.

We hosted a dinner for my Mom's cousin, and I knew I wanted to make a fall table centre piece.  I wanted to do it for free, and I was prepared for something a bit rustic.  It was fun to do.

First I walked the dog on Saturday morning, and I started to gather interesting pieces along the way.  Everything I gathered was on public property along the green belt that follows a creek in our neighborhood. 
I managed to get a pretty good selection by the time I was heading home.
It looks like this:

 

Next I found 2 glass vases in the cupboard and I started to trim the foilage and stuff them into the container a bit at a time.  I was careful to leave the flowers until last as they were quite delicate.

Here is the work part way through.

From this point I continued to stuff pieces into the vases, this way and that, and moved them around until I managed to achieve something that resembled a bouquet.

I am not a flower arranger, and I have never held myself out to be one, that is my Mother's area of skill, but she was busy and honestly, it was just plain old fun to do this.

Here is what my bouquets looked like when finished.

Here is the first one, up close:

 

And here is the second one.  Not as even and pretty as the first, but still unique and fresh all the same.

The last thing I did was add water to the vases.

 

Contents of my Rustic Fall Bouquets:

1. Red Maple Leafs (from trees along the creek)

2. Yellow Leafs (from trees along the creek)

3. Green leafs (from a bush along the creek)

4. Dried old burrs (In honour of our dog who gathers these without even trying. LOL!  I found some really cool dried bunches of burrs and took some home)

5. Purple wild flowers (creek area)

6. White wild flowers (creek area)

7. Silver dollar plant (on city property at the back of someone's house that backs onto the green belt)

8. Yellow Flowers (on city property at the back of someone's house that backs onto the green belt)  

Everything I gathered was 100% free, honest and for real and would qualify as wild or naturally growing, as I gathered it all along the greenbelt and creek area.

If you wanted to do one of these, you could have done it into a taller vase and not cut the flowers down, but i wanted mine for a dinner table, so I made mine into shorter vases.

So, if you are a Canadian, Thanksgiving is coming this weekend, you can plan for a morning walk, and a simple assembly of  wild flowers and foilage into a vase for a beautiful rustic style fall bouquet.   If you aren't Canadian but it's fall where you live, you can still do an awesome bouquet, you just don't have to worry if it will fit on your dinner table or not!  

Happy gathering and arranging!

Cassie

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Clean Freak

 It's Friday!  Time to prepare for your weekend!

First, lets do the check list for Friday:

 1. Write menu for the next week to prepare for shopping.

 2. Write grocery list and any other items you must buy at a store.



3.  Print out bank statements and update budget.

4.  It's the last business day of the month.  Do you have month end bills to pay?  Time to do that too.

5.  Plan when you will do tasks for the weekend including wash/clean out car, groceries, laundry, housework.  (yeah, for those of us who work full time and run a business on the side, most of these activities have to be done on a weekend.  Some of you are able to do this during the week and keep your weekends free.  In our house, it just isn't working that way right now.)

And besides that I just thought I'd share some musings on cleaning and tidying.

Are you a Clean Freak?  

 I mean really?  Think about it?  It's a very interesting subject and I am guilty of doing a lot of google searches on being a neat freak or a clean freak.

I am not. (a clean freak)

I wish I was to the healthy extent, but not in the OCD way that you find in so many articles.  I don't think anyone really wants to be so obsessive that they loose much needed sleep on a week night when they have to work in the morning, because they got upset about the pantry or a drawer and stayed up to the wee hours making it perfect.  That is a an effort to control things on the outside to make yourself feel calm on the inside.

I think the balance is in the truth that, making your life organized and orderly DOES in fact bring inner peace and it really does free you up to do the things you value, but it can become unbalanced if you let it become obsessive and then it's controlling you.

I think those of us who struggle to be orderly and tidy can learn great lessons by studying the ways of the super neat.  Such as:

1. They are highly visual people.  So much of what they do is a result of what they see in their world around them.  It comes from them saying "When I see the paper on the floor, I go pick it up."  "When I see the garbage can is full, I empty it and put a new bag in place"   or "When I see the tuft of cat hair on the carpet, I don't wait until the next time to vacuum, I just bend over and pick it up".

You see, the very orderly people in our lives have developed a habit of responding to the things they see around them.  The naturally messy types would see the cat hair and inwardly say "It's time to vacuum.  Now I have to vacuum this room.  It will have to wait until it's time to vacuum, I can't do it right now."   We can sabatoge our own efforts to get things in order by viewing things we see as large tasks to do, when a small task such as bending over to pick up the hair might suffice for now.

2. They allow time to organize and clean.  Have you ever invited someone out on a Friday night, or offered to hang out for a while after work and they just said something like "Thanks, but I'll pass, I have some things I want to get done at home and if I stay and visit, I won't accomplish what I need to."  I have had exactly that experience.  The clean types of people don't even realize sometimes that they mentally plan times when they will get certain things done.

3. Self Respect.  I know a few naturally clean people and it's part of their inner values.  They value being a good steward of the resources given to them by God.  Did God bless them with a house? a job? Clothes, books, media items, etc?  The clean types want to take care of what they own and make it nice for themselves and their family.  It is a healthy measure of self respect.

I fall in the middle.  I am hopelessly average.  I am not a slob, but I am not really a clean freak either.  I have some quirks.  I get very fussy over my linen closet being straightened "just so", and I am the type that can't leave a picture crooked.   I go to my friends house and start polishing their kitchen tap because I hate the soap splashes.  (Okay, maybe that soap splash thing is a bit OCD.  LOL!) 

 But I am guilty of continually fighting the stacks on my desk.  I am still getting my "in flow, out flow" of our home desk where it needs to be.  I get busy and distracted and I can fall away from our daily routines and next thing you know, the desk is a mess and someone forgot to sweep the floor, or the laundry is forgotten, and sometimes (GASP!) I even go to bed with the kitchen left in a mess!  

( I know, the kitchen one is beyond terrible and just shouldn't happen, but when you work a day job, and a business part-time, and try to keep up with family and friends, sometimes the routines slip and fatigue takes over. The punishment for that choice is there in full when your messy kitchen greets you first thing in the morning and you have to clean it before you can even start your day.)

It is a passion and life-long goal of mine to re-write these parts of my character into a person who values being organized enough to get things done. A person who won't let fatigue cause her to leave a mess where cleanliness and peacefulness should be.   I don't want to become an uptight, inflexible person, and I NEVER want to bully my family around about the housework.  I NEVER want to be remembered as the nagging Mom and Wife.  That's not worth it.

I find that when I think of myself as the person I idealize myself to be, I get more done.  If you tell yourself  "I'm a tidy person.  I don't leave my workspace a mess, and I leave the staff lunchroom spotless after I use it.", you will find yourself doing those very behaviours.

If you tell yourself "I am a clean, tidy, organized person.  I wouldn't go to bed with my clothes dumped on the floor, or I wouldn't go to bed without straightening up the house first." you just might find yourself doing more of those things.  

This is true because when there is things we would not want to be known for, we somehow shift our priorities and make it happen.  Such as looking good before you leave the house.   If you are a female reader, I am sure you can relate to a healthy sense of female pride that you don't want to go to the store in messy, stained clothes, no make-up and wild hair!  LOL!  Somehow, you just find clean clothes, a hair brush, toothpaste and all those things before going out.  It is the same with becoming a clean, tidy, organized person.  If you get on the positive side of things and tell yourself you value those things, I think you will find you get more accomplished than if you had not. 

So, as you go into your weekend, plan a few things that you want to see happen, and then affirm yourself on a job well done when you realize some of those goals.

If you are really overwhelmed and just starting out, try a website such as:

http://flylady.net/

or http://www.messies.com/

These sorts of websites have great step by step processes to help you get some wins.

We have a dinner to host on Saturday, so tonight is shopping and cleaning!

Have a fantastic weekend, and thanks for reading.

Cassie

Organized Make Up Box

Today is a link party and a small feature on my make-up organization.

I have cleaned up my make up box.  It was time, because I dropped my box and some powders broke and flew all over the box.  I used this opportunity to clean out the old make-up, thoroughly wash the box and put everything back into place nicely.

I use a make-up box instead of a case because I can line up all my cosmetics in a neat little row.
I also tote my make-up around with me if I am running late in the morning, so a portable style make-up box is important for me.

As you can see, when the box is closed up, I place on top of the stack, the portable moisture lotion, tweezers and the wrapped up item is my eyeliner sharpener.  Even with the plastic lid, shavings still fall out of the opening where you put the pencil, so I just wrap it up to keep all shavings AWAY FROM THE REST OF MY MAKE-UP CASE.  (Can you tell this really bugs me?  LOL!)

Contents of my make up case:

1. Pressed powder
2: Eye Liner
3. Mascara
4. Blush
5. Eyeshadow
6. Concealer (rarely use this)
7. Blush brush and eyeshadow brush
8. Lip liner
9. Lip gloss
10. Small moisture lotion
11. Pencil sharpener
12. Tweezers
13. Small bottle of perfume.

Here is some of my new fav's now.

As you can see, I like a soft, natural palate. 

What does your make-up case look like?

What are the essentials to you?  I'd love to hear about your beauty routines or what you carry in your make-up case.

Post your comments below, or link your blog below.

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