Praline Pumpkin Pie

I hurriedly harvested all our buttercup and volunteer pie pumpkins before our first snowstorm early Thursday morning. Hubby and I also picked every tomato that showed any sign of ripening.

We love pumpkin dessert of any sort. We tried substituting butternut for pumpkin last year and thought it delicious. When I mistakenly planted buttercup instead of butternut this spring, I was relieved to find that ’cup squash is also a good pumpkin substitute.

Thursday morning, I told Marilyn that I was about to prepare squashes for pie filling. She said I had to do one additional step before freezing them: “You must first, first, first bake us a pumpkin pie for tonight!”

I made her choice, “Pumpkin Praline Pie”, with butternut squash Hubby’s parents had grown, plus a standard pumpkin pie with our buttercup squash. Both were judged delicious by the ladies at our Bible study. They couldn’t tell whether I’d used pumpkin or one of the squashes, but they decided the praline pie was the tastier pie.

Hubby devoured the pies when he got home Friday morning.

To prepare the squash for baking, I cut one in half and microwaved it on high for 22 minutes. We have a wimpy microwave. With a decent microwave, start at 15 minutes. After that, I peeled it and pureed it in our processor. Let the squash cool before peeling it; they are hot. One medium ’cup or ’nut squash is about the equivalent of one can of pumpkin.

Pumpkin Praline Pie

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Recipe is adapted from the Kitchen Klatter cookbook.

Crust ingredients:
2 T. butter
1/3 C. brown sugar
1/3 C. pecans, chopped
1 unbaked pie shell

Method:
Combine butter, brown sugar and nuts. Mix well. Spread over bottom of pie shell. Bake at 425º for 10 minutes.

Filling ingredients:
1½ C. pumpkin
1 can evaporated milk
3 egg yolks
¼ C. sugar
¼ C. Splenda
½ C. brown sugar
1½ t. cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice
½ t. salt
1 t. burnt sugar flavoring
Whipped cream


Method:
Combine and mix well. Pour over praline layer and bake at 325º until center is firm.

Top with whipped cream.

Fill me up, buttercup

I thought I had planted butternut squash in my Three Sisters Garden. I must have misread the seed pack or the packers put the wrong seed in the package. What I have is buttercup squash.

I don’t much like the taste of winter squash and I find the texture to be extraordinarily off-putting. But I do love pumpkin pie and cake and dessert. The only reason I planted the squash was as a substitute for pumpkin filling. We found that butternut squash tastes even better than pumpkin itself in pumpkin recipes.

When I saw roundish green squash in my garden instead of elongated yellowish squash, I knew I had a case of mistaken identity. At first we thought we had acorn squash, which I absolutely detest, but instead we have buttercup.

SeasonalChef.com says that buttercup squash is “one of the most pumpkin-like of winter squashes.” So maybe The Frugal Gardener is all right after all.

So “fill me up (fill me up) Buttercup, baby
Don’t you let me down (let me down) and mess me around …
So build me up, Buttercup; don’t break my heart.”

Volunteer veggies: a pleasant surprise

I love surprises.

Sometimes my garden produces those surprises by bringing up a volunteer vegetable or flower.

I’m not always that surprised, though. Last year, I did a very poor job of picking green beans. So I have a good crop of volunteers this year. Unfortunately for the beans and their picker, the Three Sisters garden has been moved. No cornstalk poles conveniently await beans to climb them. I’m fated to crawl on hands and knees to harvest most of these. Some of them are climbing the fence I erected for them last year, for which I am grateful.

When the fall holidays were over, we threw our pumpkins and gourds into the garden, hoping that a seed would take root. If memory serves me, we threw the pumpkin on the west side of the garden and the gourds on the east. This plant, on the very eastern edge of the pond garden, is probably a mini white pumpkin. But who knows. I look forward to finding out.

This tomato is a complete surprise. I don’t remember throwing any tomatoes in the garden, but here is a tomato plant. It isn’t very healthy, though, so we’ll see if any fruit appears.

Kenny Point at Veggie Gardening Tips
suggests that gardeners learn what baby leaves look like so we don’t pull out something good. If I hadn't known what baby squash and tomato leaves look like, I would have pulled those gifts from the garde

Three Sisters Garden

We planted a Three Sisters Garden this year: corn, beans and squash. Corn consumes a very high quantity of nitrogen and wears out soil quickly. Without corn’s sisters, corn must be rotated every year to give soil a rest. With the sisters, corn supposedly can be planted in the same plot year after year.

We only have one place where we can plant corn. Last year we tried another plot with poor results. The only way we’ll have sweet corn yearly is if the Three Sisters do their job.

Beans pull nitrogen from the air into their roots, providing nutrition for the next year’s crop. Beans climb the cornstalks and stabilize them against wind. This is a big plus in our windy climate.

I wanted to plant purple beans this year because I find green beans on green plants somewhat hard to see. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find purple pole beans. When I typed “purple pole beans” into Google just now, several links appeared. I’ll be buying online next year!

Once my plants came up, I heavily mulched them with newspaper and grass to suppress weeds and fertilize the ground. Grass is very rich with nitrogen.

Once the corn canopies, little further tending is necessary.

Squash runs underneath the corn, providing living mulch. Shade from both corn and squash squelches weeds and preserves soil moisture. Squash vines are covered with spines, discouraging hungry creatures from eating their fruit and their sisters’ fruit. We planted butternut squash this year. I hope to make pie filling from it because I can’t stomach winter squash on its own. But butternut pie tastes better than pumpkin and I adore pumpkin pie.

Three Sisters combination produces lots of leftover plant material at end of season. Just as I do with all garden “trash”, I leave it on the ground until spring. Cornstalks and vines make wonderful snow traps.

Unfortunately, they don’t get along with our tiller. Cornstalks are too thick for it to chop and the vines get entangled in the tines. I burn them in our fire pit come spring.

When our fire pit is filled with ashes, we spread them on our garden, adding potash to the soil. Have I told you that the Frugal Gardener hates waste?

I can hardly wait for that sweet corn. Yum, yum!