Ideas for evaluating the overlooked parts of vegetables

Benefiting from all parts of autumn-winter vegetables is essential to prevent food waste and is smart for our health and palate.

We are happy to have recently found vegetables whole, from root to leaf. Now, tiny Bugs Bunny carrots are sold with their long green leaves, and celery with stems.

Buy vegetables on the stems, leaves, but separate them when storing because the leaves cause moisture loss. Cleaning root vegetables with a brush instead of using a knife prevents waste.

– Pumpkin: Remove the seeds from the pumpkin and wash in a colander. Mix olive oil, ground pepper and salt and put in the oven for 10-15 minutes. Use the fibrous fruit part of the pumpkin, which is usually discarded and contains the seeds, for a soft and delicious pumpkin cake after removing the seeds.

– Broccoli: Cook the broccoli with its leaves. Use the handles too. After shaving the outer surface until you remove the excess, grate it. Grated broccoli stems are ideal for a different recipe.

– Carrot: The leaves of the carrot can be slightly bitter. After blanching, that is, boil for 2-3 minutes and shocked in cold water, strain and sauté in olive oil.

– Spinach: Sure, spinach root with olive oil!

– Collard: The hard middle veins of black cabbage are usually discarded. However, you can pickle these unused parts quickly.

This uncomplicated, EXTRA moist, sugared pumpkin bread is straight up classy.

Classy, among other things. Like barely sweet, perfectly moist, and if you so choose, a perfect canvas for melty butter or – I’m going to go there – HONEY PECAN CREAM CHEESE?? – with your morning coffee.

This guy is simple and straightforward: no chocolate chips, no nuts (gah! the betrayal), and no frosting or overloaded crumble on top in my usual over-the-top style.
HOW THIS PUMPKIN BREAD CAME TO BE
Baking used to be my favorite thing – it’s actually why I started the blog. I baked almost every Saturday morning in our little condo kitchen with the terribly yellow overhead lights and the 1970’s oven and loved every second of it. My first blog post was actually a pretty average recipe for chocolate chip muffins in which I forgot to list the CHOCOLATE CHIPS. Humble beginnings.

As much as I loved baking, as Pinch of Yum started to become more of a thing, like a this-is-my-job thing, I started to feel like the “meal time” recipes were most valuable to myself (and others) rather than just baking recipes. I found that the people who were reading my little blog were hungry (aaaa! get it?) for yummy meal recipes maybe even more than they were for baking and desserts. Meal time recipes were what people wanted, they were something I enjoyed, they was performing well for the blog…

All of this led me to a place where I kind of put baking on the top shelf for a while – still there, but just out of reach.

This uncomplicated, EXTRA moist, sugared pumpkin bread is straight up classy.

Classy, among other things. Like barely sweet, perfectly moist, and if you so choose, a perfect canvas for melty butter or – I’m going to go there – HONEY PECAN CREAM CHEESE?? – with your morning coffee.

This guy is simple and straightforward: no chocolate chips, no nuts (gah! the betrayal), and no frosting or overloaded crumble on top in my usual over-the-top style.
HOW THIS PUMPKIN BREAD CAME TO BE
Baking used to be my favorite thing – it’s actually why I started the blog. I baked almost every Saturday morning in our little condo kitchen with the terribly yellow overhead lights and the 1970’s oven and loved every second of it. My first blog post was actually a pretty average recipe for chocolate chip muffins in which I forgot to list the CHOCOLATE CHIPS. Humble beginnings.

As much as I loved baking, as Pinch of Yum started to become more of a thing, like a this-is-my-job thing, I started to feel like the “meal time” recipes were most valuable to myself (and others) rather than just baking recipes. I found that the people who were reading my little blog were hungry (aaaa! get it?) for yummy meal recipes maybe even more than they were for baking and desserts. Meal time recipes were what people wanted, they were something I enjoyed, they was performing well for the blog…

All of this led me to a place where I kind of put baking on the top shelf for a while – still there, but just out of reach.

Ideas for evaluating the overlooked parts of vegetables

Benefiting from all parts of autumn-winter vegetables is essential to prevent food waste and is smart for our health and palate.

We are happy to have recently found vegetables whole, from root to leaf. Now, tiny Bugs Bunny carrots are sold with their long green leaves, and celery with stems.

Buy vegetables on the stems, leaves, but separate them when storing because the leaves cause moisture loss. Cleaning root vegetables with a brush instead of using a knife prevents waste.

– Pumpkin: Remove the seeds from the pumpkin and wash in a colander. Mix olive oil, ground pepper and salt and put in the oven for 10-15 minutes. Use the fibrous fruit part of the pumpkin, which is usually discarded and contains the seeds, for a soft and delicious pumpkin cake after removing the seeds.

– Broccoli: Cook the broccoli with its leaves. Use the handles too. After shaving the outer surface until you remove the excess, grate it. Grated broccoli stems are ideal for a different recipe.

– Carrot: The leaves of the carrot can be slightly bitter. After blanching, that is, boil for 2-3 minutes and shocked in cold water, strain and sauté in olive oil.

– Spinach: Sure, spinach root with olive oil!

– Collard: The hard middle veins of black cabbage are usually discarded. However, you can pickle these unused parts quickly.