Simple pumpkin custard

On Saturday I got to enjoy an evening with friends. After a dinner of tasty Burmese food, we retired to our friends' house for socializing and a really fun movie. However, as it was also a birthday party, the house was full of cake, chocolate-chip cookies, and lots of movie-style candy. It was serious temptation. I am able to devour sweets like a starving, rapacious beast.

I came prepared, and while everyone else was indulging in the buffet of sugar, I enjoyed my movie snack of walnuts and raisins. However, a psychological need was still present. I wanted dessert, and I was not going to be satisfied until I obtained it. Fortunately, I knew just what to do.

Pumpkin Custard

1 C pureed pumpkin*

1/4 C honey

3/4 C milk

1 egg

scant 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice mix

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Have four 1-cup glass custard cups handy. (Mine fit nicely into an 8 x 8 square pan, which means I can transport them easily all at once to and from the oven.)

Mix all ingredients until well blended. Divide equally among the four cups. Bake until the edges are firm (middle can be still a little bit liquid), about 25 to 30 minutes. Can be served warm (if you're impatient, like me) or cool.

*Try making your own pumpkin puree the next time sugar pumpkins are available. They're called sugar or pie pumpkins to distinguish them from the large jack-o'-lantern style ones. Cooked pumpkin can be pureed in your blender or food processor and stored as 1-cup servings in plastic bags in the freezer. Any time you want it for cooking, just defrost a bag or two and you're good to go.

This recipe was modified from the pumpkin pie recipe in my old Betty Crocker cookbook. In general, honey can be substituted for sugar in recipes, but you have to account for 1) the more concentrated sweetness in honey and 2) the additional liquid. So 1/3 C brown sugar + 1 T white sugar turned into 1/4 C honey, and I reduced the stated amount of milk.

A cup of pumpkin custard really hit the spot! Of course, now I'm thinking it would go really well with some whipped cream.

No Sugar = No Hunger?

I've noticed something interesting over the past little while. I'm down to eating only three meals a day. Sometimes I'll have a snack in the afternoon, but this is a far cry from the constant eating I did before. Remember just a little while back, when I posted about eating five or six meals a day since my belly would frustrate me with hunger otherwise? That's not happening anymore.

I can easily go from breakfast at 7:30 to lunch at 12:30 without feeling tired or shaky. Monday I was so busy I forgot about an afternoon snack at all, then proceeded to hike 4 miles after work before cooking supper. Yesterday I cooked and ate dinner right after work, went to a 90-minute dance class, then came home and went to bed without doing any late-night snacking. Even though my belly was empty, I just didn't feel any particular need to put food in it.

What's the cause of this physiological change? I attribute it to the lack of refined sugar and minimal refined carbs. I have a sprouted wheat bread at home, I'm baking rye sourdough bread after work, both sweet and white potatoes are in my diet, and I'm not limiting myself as to beans or fruit. Obviously, I'm still getting plenty of carbohydrates--more than 50% of my calories.

However, because all my calories are coming from nutrient-dense foods, I think my body is able to say, "Hey, I'm well-fueled. Got everything I need to get through the day. Oh, and here's plenty of energy for those long hikes you're so fond of. Let's go on another one."

Much to my boyfriend's chagrin (once he finds out), I'm not planning to go back to my former way of eating once Lent is over. Dessert can be just for special occasions, not every time we go out. Honey makes a great sweetener for when I need to bake things, and it's expensive enough that I won't be using it liberally over everything.

This is awesome!

Awesome Sweet Snack Recipe

Combining a couple of recipes in my brain last night, I came up with the following:

Fruit-Nut Balls

1/2 C walnuts

1/2 C almonds

1/2 C prunes (sliced in half)

1/2 C dates (pits removed and quartered)

2 T cocoa powder

2 T shredded coconut (plus extra for rolling)

1/2 t cinnamon

~1 T coconut oil

1: assemble your ingredients. Make sure they're the best-quality ingredients you can find, such as nuts and fruits purchased at your local farmers' market. :) And in case you were wondering, that's unsweetened coconut. Get your food processor down from the top of the fridge.

2: process the almonds and walnuts until they're a crumbly meal. They don't need to be powder, but there shouldn't be too many large chunks. Remove from the processor into a small bowl.

3: process the dates and prunes until they're finely ground. Since I used very dry dates and prunes, this was more of a fruity crumbly meal than a paste. It'll be okay in the end. Just make sure that you have only fine pieces.

4: add the cinnamon, cocoa, and coconut and pulse a few times. Add the nuts and coconut oil and mix well to blend. With the addition of the oil, the texture becomes more like a crumbly paste. Check to see whether it will hold together in a ball. If so, you're good. If not, add a little more coconut oil until a cohesive texture is reached.

5: form heaping tablespoons into balls, compacting well with your hands. Roll in coconut to coat. The balls can be eaten directly, or stored in an airtight container in the fridge.

I've got some ideas for the next time I give this a try. Chia seeds would be a good add-in. I'm wondering whether I could also grind some cacao nibs with the nuts. At some point, a tablespoon or two of dark rum is going to be added to this. I love the idea of rum balls based on fruits & nuts rather than vanilla wafers and sugar. The possibilities are nigh-endless: apricot for the prunes and macadamia nuts for the almonds. Pecans. Hazelnuts. Entirely almonds. A bit of orange peel in with the fruits. Or some ginger and a touch of molasses. Mold the mixture using dinosaur-shaped cookie cutters instead of simply into spheres. :) Give it a go, and tell me how your experiment comes out!

(And, yes, my brain keeps harkening back to South Park on this, and perhaps someday I'll be able to come up with a better title than "Fruit-Nut Balls".)

Variety!

As I was packing my lunch this morning, I looked at it and thought about how fortunate I am to eat so well. There's an issue in the SAD which relates to the varieties of food consumed in one day--most people tend to eat the same few ingredients every day. I decided to break down my last four meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack) into their components to see what sort of variety I'm eating. Divided into logical categories, here we go:

Nut and legume--peanut, almond, walnut, lentil, lima bean

Grain--oat, rye, wheat

Fruit--date, raisin, apple, pear, clementine

Vegetable--onion, garlic, carrot, celery, tomato, collard green, red cabbage, beet, pumpkin

Dairy--cow milk, butter, yogurt; egg; goat cheese

Other--cinnamon, clove, honey, chia seeds, herbes de provance, thyme, bay leaf, baking powder, sea salt

Some good variety, I think. Of course, I wasn't eating massive quantities of all of these. When you break down a pumpkin cookie, for instance, there's only a tablespoon of actual pumpkin in it. When you use a bay leaf for flavor in a stew, you don't end up eating the actual leaf. However, that small amount is still providing essential goodness, doing its job for your overall nutrition.

Give this a try! Think back over your last day's meals and separate things out into their original components. See whether you have as much variety as you'd like, and think about which categories could use a few additions.

Regarding the no sugar challenge I'm on, I have noticed one of the typical side effects of not eating refined sugar: I'm not having the usual problems with my complexion. Even with my current hormonal roller coaster, my face hasn't broken out lately. It's so nice. Maybe there's some truth after all, in the old wives' saying along the lines of "don't eat junk food--it'll make your face break out."

Scarf knitting project is moving right along. One yarn has gone from black to gray to black, while the other is moving from purple to bright blue slowly back to purple. Sometimes knitting does this to me: I want to keep going and going just to see how the color change/lace pattern/two-color pattern will turn out.

Really looking forward to the farmers' market tomorrow!