Pasta with Pumpkin Sauce

Have you ever wanted a bowl of pasta but were quite tired of the same old tomato or marinara sauce on pasta? Or if you're a little more old school and keep it clean with just garlic and olive oil, haven't you wished you could bring a new, fresh flavor into your bowl of pasta? I felt exactly that way last week, and I wanted a new sauce quickly (in about the time it took the pasta to cook).

I had a can of pumpkin around, and if you've been reading this blog from the beginning you might have gotten the hint that I am a culinary sucker for pumpkin. It's really just so versatile in how you can use it in so many dishes, either as a star or as part of the supporting cast. Faigy and I (if you haven't noticed, my wife and I are co-bloggers now; I lucked out with someone just as (if not more so) culinarily talented and inclined as myself) have been toying with the idea of making pumpkin gnocchi for quite some time now. Unfortunately it was a rather lazy Sunday so that wasn't happening. But we could do the next best thing - have pasta with some sort of pumpkin sauce.

I wanted to really highlight the savory notes of pumpkin this time, which stands in contrast to a lot of other pumpkin recipes I'm a fan of. I decided to use dairy as the platform upon which to build these flavors - first and foremost starting with frying (not just sautéeing) onions in butter. Some milk thins out the thicker canned pumpkin and gives the sauce some creaminess, but what really steps up the flavor is fresh-grated Parmesan cheese. It's sometimes hard to find blocks of Parmesan kosher, so in a pinch the bottled pre-grated Miller's stuff will do, but it's hard to beat the fresh stuff. The cheese brings out some of the nuttiness dormant in the butter and pumpkin, and is enhanced if you add the toasted crushed walnuts.

The last really crucial thing to this recipe is the finishing touch: extra virgin olive oil. Now, I am often one to just skip garnishes and like accoutrements to recipes I see; you are free to do so with the others in this recipe, but I warn you, DO NOT SKIP THIS. The fruitiness of the olive oil adds a really powerful contrasting accent to the savory sauce we've built up and teases out some of the fruitiness the pumpkin is hiding. Since it's raw, definitely use the extra virgin stuff (we just used generic Fairway brand and it was fantastic).

You can in fact make this entire recipe pareve/dairy-free (as indicated) but be aware that if at all possible, you should re-make it in its dairy form another time to compare and contrast.

A fresh autumn take on pasta sauce

Chewy Fruity Breakfast Bars

Some days I have classes really early, so I was looking for the perfect breakfast bar recipe that would be filling and last for a long time in the fridge (so I don't have to start baking weekly before class!). Of course, I also wanted to look forward to eating this thing early in the morning. After some searching around the internet, I didn't find any recipe that seemed just right, so of course I just mashed together a couple of recipes and then took it from there to make up my own. 

I took inspiration from recipes by Alton Brown and another blog I found called One Hundred Eggs. Actually, the baking instructions are almost entirely from the latter, as the method of cooking these bars generally stays the same. It's a pretty flexible recipe in general, so you should feel free to swap some of the dried fruit for other dried fruit you like, or some of the nuts for other kinds of nuts. Just make sure the moisture to dry content ratio stays about the same to get the chewy bar texture we're seeking here.

A single portion of the finished product

Apple Blueberry Muffins

Ari has been encouraging me to add some of my own recipes to this blog, and I've finally gotten around to it now that I'm home-bound due to Hurricane Sandy!

These delicious muffins are healthy and dairy-free. I based this recipe on a another health-conscious mini muffin recipe I found. While it looked great, I didn't want my muffins to have dairy or to be small, and I had no bananas on hand. What resulted was an entirely new recipe that are great to have around the house for breakfast or snack.

I specifically used pastry flour to get an airy texture, and I picked dry over fresh blueberries so as not to over-saturate the muffins with moisture (and a pervasive blue dye!). The original recipe calls for a cup of vanilla yogurt and half a cup of milk. As I was seeking something dairy-free, I thought that the vanilla pudding mix would add the flavor and some of the moisture the yogurt adds, while also adding to the amount of milk to ensure enough liquid in the mixture.

This recipe can be adapted in many ways, especially by swapping out the apples and blueberries for other add-ins, like chocolate chips, nuts, or other fruit.

Enjoy! What are your favorite ways to modify dairy recipes?