Halloween - carve your pumpkins!

We really like making gluten free desserts from Pumpkins, but, to be quite honest, we "cheat" and use the canned pumpkin - it is just so much easier. There are pumpkins that are especially good for pumpkin pie filling, but those pumpkins are not the type you will see most often around Halloween for decorative purposes. When you go to create you Jack-o-Lantern, chances are you have a much larger variety that would probably not be optimal for baking with.

We acquired our pumpkins (pictured above) from farmers an hour South of us, and a couple from local stores once they were marked down the last few days before Halloween - most were only a couple bucks. We had beautiful weather here in Ohio Sunday and Monday this week (versus the rain/snow mix that has plagued most of October), so we carved our pumpkins and lit them up last night.

That is part of what has been keeping us busy, but only a small part. I have taken time to begin the migration of this gluten free blog to the new Blogger Beta so I could use "labels" to better categorize my postings over time, and be able to group things like "Recipes", "News", and so forth. Should make life easier for readers.

On the gluten free recipes side of things, my wife has been busy as always. In fact, she created a perfect fall-holiday dessert we will soon publish the recipe for: gluten-free pumpkin roll! Mmmmmm! Delicious! I have not had a pumpkin roll in ages; in fact, not since I went GF quite some time ago. The problem was always getting the gluten free version of the recipe to handle the rolling up step, since without gluten it does not have the elasticity that a normal pumpkin roll would have. Well, Laura has done it, and with minimal added Xanthan Gum. And, the flavor is quite similar to any good pumpkin roll I can remember.

While she works on recipes, I have been trying to eradicate the fall leaves that have piled up in the yard. That has been a non-stop adventure. No sooner do I have them cleaned up, then a whole new wave of them come down. And, we have well over a hundred trees in the yard, so this is no small pile I am talking about - the resulting pile is the larger than my dining room. I pile them up in the back of the yard to make compost material for the garden/flower-beds. Every year the pile starts out huge, and then reduces to about a foot or two deep as it decomposes. And, yes, the Halloween pumpkins will end up on that same pile in a few weeks. Call it recycling on a grand scale. :)

In addition, I have been working on our website and other aspects of the book-sale preparations. Not much is visible online perhaps, but hopefully that will change in the coming week. Our online recipe collection has been increasing, and plenty more are on the way as we have time to post them. In addition to the pumpkin-roll, we have a nice quinoa dish, plus some roasted peppers and garlic, and our daughter even created an interesting and tasty Panettone style bread (a sweeter bread with dried fruit and nuts in it).