Honey Roasted Root Vegetables

Copied almost verbatim from the Cooking Light recipes by the same name, this is quickly becoming "my" Thanksgiving dish. It is good all year though as long as the weather is cool enough for the oven.

Ingredients:
coarsely chopped peeled sweet potato (about 1 large) or winter squash or pumpkin
coarsely chopped peeled turnip (about 2 medium)
coarsely chopped parsnip (about 4 medium)
coarsely chopped carrot (about 6 medium)
1/4 cup honey (I like Orange Blossom but any full flavored honey will do)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 shallots, quartered

Preheat oven to 450°.
Combine all ingredients except the cooking spray in a large bowl; toss to coat. Place vegetable mixture on a jelly-roll pan coated with cooking spray. Bake at 450° for 35 minutes or until vegetables are tender and begin to brown, stirring every 10 minutes.

Pumpkin Cheesecake

Ariel requested a cheesecake for Thanksgiving, and of course that meant I had to put pumpkin in it. This is a reduced-sugar version of this recipe by Cooking Light, and can be made wholly sugar-free by simply omitting the crust. It'd be good without the crust, I only add it for the benefit of guests who expect crusts.



Ingredients:

50 vanilla wafer cookies
2 tbsp butter or margarine
4 blocks 1/3 reduced fat cream cheese
1 can pumpkin
1 1/4 cup Splenda
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
2/3 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp cloves
2 tsp vanilla
4 eggs
1 tbsp molasses

Crush the wafers - a food processor is good for this, but you can also crush them with a rolling pin inside a plastic bag. Melt the butter and mix it into the crumbs, then spread the crumbs in the bottom of either a springform pan or a silicone cake pan at least 3 inches deep. Pat the crumbs down and bake at 400 for 8 minutes.

Combine the Splenda and the spices in a small bowl, stirring with a whisk. Put the cream cheeses into a large microwave-safe bowl and warm up in the microwave, 10 seconds at a time, until they are easy to stir. Stir in the pumpkin, the vanilla, and the eggs, followed by the Splenda mixture.

Important note about stirring: If you beat air into a cheesecake, it will puff up and curdle when you bake it and you won't be happy with the results. Stirring must be done with care to avoid this. I don't use a machine - a food processor is wildly inappropriate for this, and a mixer gives (heh heh) mixed results. Use a spoon and be careful, or use my special cheesecake secret: An immersion blender! You can stick the immersion blender into the batter, carefully to avoid trapping bubbles, and then stir the batter with the blending stick (while blending) and as long as you don't lift the stick up too high, it won't whip any air in and you'll have a perfectly smooth batter.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake at 350 for 10 minutes. Then turn the oven down and bake at 300 for 50 minutes. The cheesecake is done when the outer inch or two is beginning to turn golden and puff slightly, but the inside is flat. Cracks are okay, they happen to everyone and no one will care because it tastes AMAZING.

Pumpkin Flan

There's a delicious recipe for butternut flan in Cookling Light, but it has serious flaws. Butternut squash, though delicious, is annoying to process, and the recipe produces a watery, bland result when followed exactly (reviewers agree).

I have a different version made with canned pumpkin. You might use fresh pumpkin, but I don't, not for pies: Fresh pumpkin is an unpredictable product, sometimes stringy and watery, sometimes picked unripe and allowed to turn orange off the vine, resulting in a flavorless result. But the biggest issue is the irregular moisture content.

Canned pumpkin has a good and predictable flavor, a low moisture content, and is very easy to use. The disadvantage is the slight "canned" flavor, which is not noticable in a highly spiced recipe, but unpleasant (to me) in a recipe where the flavor of the pumpkin is the dominant flavor, like pumpkin soup.

Thus, I use canned for pies and breads/muffins/cookies/etc., and fresh for soups and anytime I intend to use it as cubes instead of puree.

But all this is beside the point. The pumpkin flan is essentially a pumpkin pie, but instead of a crust, it has caramel flan sauce on the bottom! The filling can be made with Splenda (custards are one of the best times to use artificial sweeteners), and with no crust, there's no white flour or butter, so the end result consists mostly of wholesome milk, eggs, and pumpkin.

Filling:

1 can unsweetened plain pumpkin puree (NOT pumpkin pie filling)
1 5-ounce can evaporated milk
1/2 cup milk
2/3 cup Splenda or equivalent
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves or allspice
3 eggs
1 egg yolk

Sauce:

1/3 cup sugar (raw sugar is okay)
1 tsp corn syrup (you can leave it out if you don't have any)
3 tbsp water

Coat 6 custard cups (ramekins) with butter or cooking spray. Preheat the oven to 325. Place 6 cups of water on the back burner and let it heat up while you're working.

Make the caramel sauce by putting the ingredients into a small pan, ideally stainless steel or heavy anodized aluminum, and stirring over medium heat until it melts together. Then leave it to boil, NOT stirring, until it turns golden. Then, immediately pour the hot sugar into the ramekins, working quickly because it will harden and become unusable if it cools. Fill the pot with water once you're done, and leave it to soak so it will be easy to clean later.

Combine the filling ingredients in a bowl and stir well. Don't mix air into it - that means be careful if you use a whisk, and don't use an electric mixer or blender. If you have an immersion blender, however, this is a great time to use it, provided you insert the blender carefully and keep it under the surface to avoid whipping air in. The reason to avoid stirring in air is because if you do, the filling will puff up and have an odd texture.

Place the ramekins onto a jelly-roll pan (baking sheet with a lip around the edges, as opposed to the kind that is totally flat) and pour the filling into them. Then place the pan into the oven. THEN, carefully pour the hot water you've been boiling into the pan, so that the ramekins are sitting in the hot water. Depending on the size of your pan, you might have to add more water; you want it to be almost full, such that the ramekins are sitting in water about halfway up their sides.

Bake for 25 minutes, then open the oven. Remove the ramekins carefully, putting them on a cooling rack, and leave the hot water in the oven until it's cooled off and is safe to remove. Don't try to take the whole pan out at once! It will spill and you might burn yourself!



Weird things I did and why:

1. Why some whole eggs and some yolks? An authentic flan is made with all yolks, but that's pretty rich and unhealthy, and then I never know what to do with the whites. But you can make it with 6 yolks instead if you like.

2. Can I make this non-dairy? Yes. Replace the evaporated milk with plain non-dairy liquid creamer, and replace the regular milk with your favorite milk substitute.


3. Why the immersion blender? I love my immersion blender. It is easy to use and easy to clean. It's good for custards because it will blend up the albumen (egg white stringy bits) so the custard has an even texture, without whipping air into it. Just slip the blender in carefully to avoid trapping air, and turn it on, keeping the head underwater. I also use this for mixing cheesecake batter for the same reason. Air bubbles are the enemy of cheesecake.

You can serve the flan by upending it over a plate, but I find that difficult, so I just eat it out of the ramekin. Yum!