Christmas Baking

Christmas Eve has been a day of cooking, all day long. To start with, I’m brining a turkey for our friends’ family (our friends are lifelong vegetarians, and I like a challenge). That will be baked in the morning, of course. The rest of the day, though, was consumed by baking bread, baking a kabocha-squash and then turning it into two pies (see Bryanna’s Vegan Pumpkin Pie for the basic recipe), and making a gluten roast in the slow-cooker (see Ellen’s Kitchen for that recipe). Truly: it’s been a long day, but at least there’ll be some goodies for the morning!

The pie, on tasting it, turned out a little too spiced and a little too sweet. Since we two are the only ones who really like pumpkin pie around here, nobody but us will complain. Next time, though, we’ll back off on the spices and cut out the molasses entirely. We used coconut milk instead of the soy milk, which is an awesome substitution. It’s very subtle in the finished pie, but is definitely worth it. We used a kabocha squash, halved, baked cut side up.

It’s certainly a real treat, having access to a large kitchen. At one point, we had both ovens going, baking 6 pans of rolls and two loaves of bread. There was a little space left over, even at all that, so we could have baked the pumpkin at the same time. A truly huge kitchen, indeed!