Pioneer Woman
Although Halloween is over I would have to say that this weekend had a Pumpkin theme. The neighbors invited us over for dinner and we asked what we could bring and we were given the task of dessert. Since I loath the grocery store I needed to come up with something I already had the ingredients for. As I was playing in the front yard with Blythe I noticed the pumpkin and decided I should make a pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin. I am not a big pumpkin pie fan, but I could become one pretty quick if I didn't have to go to the grocery store. I searched around on the Internet and found a recipe for a home made (with real pumpkins) pumpkin pie and sure enough I had all the ingredients.
First I had to cut the pumpkin and dissect it, very similar to a cantaloupe.
Then I baked it on the oven (similar to a squash) until it was soft enough for me to scrape the insides with an ice cream scoop.
Then I pureed the scooped innards to create my pumpkin pie mush (the non an version)
After that the hard part was over and it was just a matter of throwing the remaining ingredients in and baking it. What I wasn't expecting was having 8 cups of pumpkin mush when I only needed 3 so that meant I had to make another pumpkin pie dish so I went with pumpkin soup because we could eat that as a meal and again avoid the grocery store.
And of course a picture of my assistant as she sat and watched and encourage me with her big smiles.
[Here is the link I used to make the pumpkin pie. http://www.pickyourown.org/pumpkinpie.php
Note: I did not think the insides scooped out all that easily (on the pre-baked side) so I ended up cutting it like I would a cantaloupe and it wasn't a problem having several pieces instead of just two. After baking I used the ice cream scoop and it worked well.
Our medium pumpkin yielded 8 cups instead of the needed 3 so I made it into pumpkin soup. There is a pumpkin soup link on here, but it seemed pretty bland so I looked at a few others and then just did what I had on hand.
Soup:
One medium onion
One carrot
6 garlic cloves
*sauté above ingredients
7 cups of chicken broth
The rest of your pumpkin pureed guts
Thyme
Parsley
Salt
Pepper
1 cup of cream
*add all and keep in pot until hot
In the end I added about a ¼ cup of cream cheese cause I thought it could use a little cheese, but mozzarella or Parmesan or whatever you have on had would work
***now go get those Halloween pumpkins off the porch before they rot, or bring them to me and I will come up with something else!
It turned out well and I didn’t think it tasted too pumpkin(ish)]
I was sharing this story with the playgroup when I got the name pioneer woman so I guess I can see where that came from.
Yuppie
I have heard this term used before, but I couldn't define it so I went ahead and looked it up: Yuppie (short for "young urban professional" or "young upwardly-mobile professional")
[1] is a term that refers to a member of the upper middle class in their twenties or thirties.[2] It first came into use in the early-1980s and largely faded from American popular culture in the late-1980s, due to the 1987 stock market crash and the early 1990s recession. However it has been used in the 2000s and 2010s in places such as in National Review, The Weekly Standard, and Details.
To put this in context, I had just loaded jericho and Blythe into the double jogging stroller and was about to start our jog home from morning playgroup when Jeff said "Monica, your such a Yuppie; your either here in your BMW or sprinting your kids from place to place." At first I thought, wait isn't driving a BMW and then taking your kids from place to place on foot in a used, faded jogging stroller completely opposite?
Upon further review of the definition I just don't think I fall into this category. I would say that I am far from obsessing over my social status and equally as far from materialistic. I don't think being a stay at home mom with a husband in graduate school puts us in the middle much less the upper class.
[Yuppies are made fun of for their conspicuous personal consumption and obsession over social status among their peers, which is seen as vain and materialistic. Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever, has remarked, "When people were denouncing yuppies, they had considerably lower incomes than yuppies, so the things yuppies spent their money on seemed frivolous and unnecessary from their vantage point."
Yuppism... is not definable entirely by income or class. Rather, it is a late-twentieth-century cultural phenomenon of self-absorbed young professionals, earning good pay, enjoying the cultural attractions of sophisticated urban life and thought, and generally out of touch with, indeed antithetical to, most of the challenges and concerns of a far less well-off and more parochial Middle America. For the yuppie male a well-paying job in law, finance, academia, or consulting in a cultural hub, hip fashion, cool appearance, studied poise, elite education, proper recreation and fitness, and general proximity to liberal-thinking elites, especially of the more rarefied sort in the arts, are the mark of a real man.[4]]
So I am not really a pioneer woman or a yuppie, just a wife and a mom who is spoiled by a great husband and great kids.
Apparently Blythe learned to cut paper....
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