Pumpkin Pie with Cottage Cheese

Thanksgiving 2011 may have set a record for the number of cookbook dishes produced at one meal. There were five, if you include mayonnaise, which I needed for Crevettes Paula. I have to say, I have been eying this recipe for pumpkin pie with cottage cheese for years, and have always dismissed it. Now that I finally made it, I see that dismissing it was a good thing.
The main thing that makes this recipe different from other pumpkin pie recipes is not the cottage cheese, which is probably a good, lower calorie option than the traditional canned milk, but the fact that it does not have any sugar at all in it. It does have a teaspoon of salt and a quarter of a cup of sherry. All this combines to make a not very desserty pumpkin pie.
My son, who always reviews the dishes, said it was very salty. "What did you do to it?" he demanded. My husband said we ought to just throw away the leftover pie.
He said I should say in the review, "Believe me, you don't want to eat this. I cooked this so you wouldn't have to."
Now, given Hewlitt's tendency to not test her recipes, I don't know if the lack of sugar was intentional, or merely a typo.
What I can say about this recipe that's positive, is, if you cut the salt down to a quarter of a teaspoon, left out the sherry and put in artificial sweetener, you would have a lower calorie pumpkin pie that might taste good. I would test it well before Thanksgiving before I sprang it on diabetic Aunt Minnie.
I made the pie on Wednesday night. For some reason, even though I preheated the oven, the pie didn't set. I kept having to come back to the oven, test the pie by sticking a wooden skewer into it, and set the timer for ten more minutes. Finally, I took my husband's advice and just turned the oven off and left the pie in the oven overnight. Luckily I remembered to take it out for the cookathon that ensued the following morning. Also luckily, the mice that have returned to our stove like the swallows to Capistrano did not eat it.

Pumpkin Pie with Cottage Cheese

2 cups pumpkin puree
1 cup cottage cheese, sieved
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt (way too much)
1/4 cup sour cream
2 eggs lightly beaten
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup dry sherry (believe me, it doesn't do anything for the pie. Leave it out.)
1 unbaked nine-inch pie shell
whipped cream

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
2. Mix the pumpkin with the cottage cheese, ginger, cinnamon, salt and sour cream.
3. Beat the eggs with the milk and sherry and gradually stir into the pumpkin mixture. Pour into the pie shell.
4. Bake ten minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees and bake thirty minutes longer or until set. Cool and chill. Serve cold, garnished with whipped cream. Makes six to eight servings.

Scalloped Sweets and Cranberries

This was presented as an alternative to the traditional sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. Nobody actually said much about it one way or the other. Through not reading the recipe, I mashed the sweet potatoes. They are not supposed to be mashed, although it doesn't really make much difference one way or the other.
While I was peeling and mashing, my husband was eviscerating the turkey, having read in the New York Times that turkey cooks better if you split it in half. It was actually very good, although it deprived the guests of the sight of the Norman Rockwell like turkey. We don't plonk it down and carve it at the table anyway. Bob carves it before we eat and then everyone serves themselves. It did taste better. If you want to do it next year, get yourself a really good pair of shears, because you have to cut out the backbone.
You have to make homemade cranberry sauce to make this recipe. This is not a major event. You can set it to boil while you do something else, like make a last pass with the vacuum cleaner or scrub off the sinister looking streaks on the floor, which is what I was doing when the first guest arrived.

Scalloped Sweets and Cranberries

6 sweet potatoes cooked, peeled and sliced lengthwise
1 1/2 cups homemade whole cranberry sauce
3/4 cup water
1/2 cup brown sugar
3/4 teaspoon grated orange rind
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 tablespoon butter

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
2. Place the sweet potato slices in a greased two-quart casserole.
3. Combine the cranberry sauce, water, brown sugar, orange rind and cinnamon in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer five minutes.
4. Add the butter and pour over sweet potatoes. Bake twenty minutes. Makes six servings.

Mayonnaise

This mayonnaise is not as mayonnaise-y as the mayonnaise I made in the spring of 2010. I think it was called Blender Mayonnaise. Make mayonnaise in the blender. It's much easier, and it seems to come out better. My excuse is, I was following the directions, which said beat with a wire whisk, rotary beater, or electric mixer.
The recipe says that the cook is to place a half teaspoon of dry mustard in a bowl with a teaspoon of cold water and let it sit for ten minutes. I did that. I was pretty meticulous in following the directions, but the mayonnaise turned out thin. Maybe it is supposed to be that way. I don't know.
I had one nervous moment when I dumped about a teaspoon of cayenne pepper into the mix instead of a pinch, as required. It was okay, not incredibly hot, but hot enough to make the mayonnaise interesting.

Mayonnaise

1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon cold water
2 egg yolks
salt to taste
Pinch of cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons wine vinegar or lemon juice
1 1/4 cups peanut oil or vegetable oil

1. Place the mustard in a mixing bowl. Add the water to make a paste. Let stand ten minutes.
2. Add the egg yolks, salt, cayenne and have the vinegar or lemon juice. Start beating with a wire whisk, rotary beater or electric mixer, gradually adding the oil. Continue beating, adding the oil and remaining vinegar alternatively until all the ingredients are used. Taste for seasoning and add more salt, cayenne or vinegar if desired.
Makes one and one-half cups.

Crevettes Paula

I decided, rather than the more traditional soup, I would serve some kind of shellfish as an appetizer. Why not? The Pilgrims learned to catch shellfish from their Indian sponsors. Besides, I don't think there remains a single Thanksgiving-y soup left uncooked. We had pumpkin soup for Thanksgiving in 1987, corn soup in 1994, turnip and potato soup in 2004, and cream of spinach in 1991. The turnip and potato soup inspired the terrific line from my son, after he suspiciously asked me what was in it, and I stoutly told him it was potato soup, he said, "I'm not not going to eat it." Meaning, he was going to eat it.
So on Wednesday night, after my daughter picked me up from school at 5:00, rescuing me from the clutches of Miguel and Anthony, the tutoring kids, we went off to the seafood market to buy shrimp. I made the mistake of asking the seafood market how much I needed. If you remember the lobster rolls of May 2010, the seafood market has a habit of, shall we say, making sure that the consumer won't run out of what ever it is they are making. They sold me two and a quarter pounds, all they had left. Considering that Crevettes Paula came at the beginning of a heavy meal with a lot of side dishes, I think one pound would have been plenty.
The recipe calls for a cup of shrimp to serve three people. I think each person had at least a cup of shrimp, maybe more. So after I put the rolls in the refrigerator to rise, I began shelling shrimp. And shelling shrimp. And shelling shrimp. Shelling shrimp can be time consuming.
I cooked the shrimp according to directions in The Joy of Cooking, which says to boil them three to four minutes, or before they begin to curl up.
Mrs. Joy has a formula for figuring out how much shrimp in the shell translates to how much cooked shrimp. According to her, 2 to 2 1/2 pounds of fresh shrimp turns into one pound of cooked shrimp, or two cups. I should have read her first.
After I boiled the shrimp, I made the mayonnaise. My rule is, make mayonnaise in the blender. It comes out better. However, this said to make it with a mixer in a bowl, so I did. It was thin. However, no one complained. So I mixed the mayonnaise and the other ingredients, tossed it with the freshly cooked shrimp and stuck it in the refrigerator. Everyone seemed to like it except for daughter-in-law, who, after all, had just come from Thanksgiving dinner at her mother's, and maybe decided that she could skip the appetizer. A sensible approach.

Crevettes Paula

1 cup homemade mayonnaise
1 teaspoon finely grated onion
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon catchup
1 tablespoon cognac
1 cup cooked, shelled and deveined shrimp
lettuce cups

Combine the mayonnaise, onion, garlic, catchup and cognac in a bowl. Add the shrimp, toss and chill. Serve in lettuce cups. Makes three servings.

Pumpkin Rolls

Do not look for the full Thanksgiving dinner in this blog. Those recipes, for the turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce, were cooked 30 years ago. I believe I have made every single stuffing or "dressing" as they call it in the Midwest, recipe in this cookbook. In fact, the only recipe for turkey is Roast Oregon Turkey with sausage dressing, and I made that before I started putting dates next to the recipes. It just has a check mark.
I do remember Thanksgiving of what must have been 1978, when Bob and I lived in a huge, cheap apartment on Q Street in Georgetown. I was working on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and we had turkey and oyster stuffing. This was before Bob became allergic to shellfish.
Anyhow, this is strictly side dish land. I suppose, if it was going to be truly useful to the general public, I would have made my entire Thanksgiving dinner two weeks early just to blog about it. However, this is not the food section of The Washington Post. Thanksgiving dinner gets made on Thanksgiving. Also, I don't have that many readers.
When I planned the menu, I went through the cookbook asking Bob, my husband, if I could make various dishes. His response was invariably, "Make anything you want." Well, this was not exactly true, because I wanted to jettison the traditional beans cooked for a million years in favor of greens. He said okay to the greens, but somehow the beans cooked for a million years ended up still on the menu. Which was actually not such a bad thing because I never got around to the greens in the frenzy of rolls, appetizer, stuffing, yams, etc.
Well, Pumpkin Rolls were a huge success. In spite of the fact that people were probably trying to moderate their intake, and two of the guests had been to a Thanksgiving dinner previously, the diners fell upon them with glad cries and began buttering like crazy.
This is a day before recipe, which I did not read through, so thus did not begin to make the day before, as instructed. We rolled out of bed about 9:00, ate a leisurely breakfast and got to work. I started the rolls first, got the dough going and popped them into a crowded refrigerator. We invited people for 4:30 and ate around 5:30 so they probably rose about 4-5 hours. Especially if you were making the rolls for evening dinner as opposed to a midday Thanksgiving dinner, you could begin them the day you intended to eat them.
Not starting them the day before was not a problem. The dough rose in the refrigerator, I divided it into 32 equal portions, and it rose again outside the refrigerator. The rolls were a lovely deep yellow color from the pumpkin and they baked in less time than called for by the recipe. I was sitting in the living room chatting with the guests when I suddenly started to smell a burning smell. It came from one pan of rolls that were on a bottom shelf. Don't try to bake stuff on the bottom shelf. It seems to burn. People ate them nonetheless, and we foisted off the leftover burnt ones on our son and daughter-in-law the lawyers. This is a great recipe. You should definitely make this for next year's Thanksgiving dinner, or a fall harvest festival dinner, should you be hosting one.

Pumpkin Rolls

1 cup canned or homemade pumpkin puree
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk, scalded
1 package active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
1/2 cup melted shortening
2 teaspoons grated lemon rind
5 cups flour
melted butter

1. Day before, combine the pumpkin, sugar, salt and milk in a large bowl and beat until smooth and lukewarm.
2. Dissolve the yeast in the water and add to the lukewarm mixture. Add the shortening and lemon rind and mix well.
3. Add about half the flour and beat until batter is smooth. Add remaining flour to make a soft dough. Mix well with the hands or a wooden spoon. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk. Cover dough with waxed paper and a towel and chill overnight in the refrigerator.
4. Next day, shape the dough by dividing into thirty-two equal portions. For cloverleaf rolls, make three balls out of each portion and drop into greased medium-size muffin tins. The dough may be made into other shapes if desired.
5. Brush the top of the rolls with melted butter. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about one and one-quarter hours.
6. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
7. Bake rolls twenty-five to thirty minutes, or until done. Brush with melted butter and cool on a rack. Makes thirty-two.

Cucumber Salad

This is cucumber salad from Minnesota. Simple, easy, go for it. My husband, Bob, picked it out. He put in some sugar, but not as much as called for by the recipe. Even though he is a Midwesterner by birth, he does not go for much sugar in salads. You might try adjusting the recipe to your taste.

Cucumber Salad

2 medium-size cucumbers, peeled and thinly sliced
Salt
1 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon chopped parsley

1. Sprinkle the cucumbers lightly with salt. Let stand ten minutes. Rinse, drain and place in serving dish.
2. Meanwhile, combine the vinegar, sugar and pepper and let stand five minutes. Pour over cucumbers and sprinkle with the parsley. Chill two hours. Makes six servings.

Chuck's Roasted Sweet Peppers

Here we ventured all the way to Northern California, and doctored the recipe to make a very good, light appetizer that doesn't stuff the guests or break the bank. My husband took Chuck's recipe and spread goat cheese and pine nuts on top. It was terrific. Chuck's way is fine too, but I liked the goat cheese and the pine nuts. Please note that this is a day before recipe. You have to roast the peppers over the burners on your stove before you start to make this recipe.

Chuck's Roasted Sweet Peppers

4 red sweet peppers
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/4 cup olive oil

1. Day before, or early in the day, preheat the oven to 400 degrees and place the peppers on the oven shelf.(Or put them on the burner over an open flame.) Let roast thirty minutes. (The open flame takes less time.) or until the skins puff up and the peppers look slightly charred. (Over the open flame, they will look extremely charred.)
2. With potholders or asbestos gloves (??!!) hold the hot peppers and gently peel off the skin, saving all the juice that is released. Remove and discard the seeds. Slice the peppers into thin strips and arrange in a baking dish with the juice.
3. Sprinkle with the garlic, salt, pepper and oil and refrigerate, covered until serving time.
4. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
5. Bake pepper strips, uncovered, twenty minutes, or until bubbling hot. Makes four servings.