I Heart My Immersion Blender

Stay at home moms bake. A lot. And stay at home moms of children with milk and egg allergies probably bake even more. So, as previous posts have mentioned I've been baking and experimenting. Today I took on two things I never thought I'd consider doing, due to the time involved. But it went much more smoothly than I ever thought it would. Way back before Halloween, I stocked up on pie pumpkins. They were cute, they were 5 for a $1.00. How could I say no? But then Halloween came and went and these things are still sitting around the house. Yeah, they are Thanksgiving-y too, but really, I needed to deal with them before they rotted. Soooo, I did something my mother recommended I not. When I told her what I had in mind, she said "toss 'em", and those of you who know my mother, you know she's a great cook and not one to shy at doing things from scratch. But her advice was: it's not worth the effort. She had tried it back when she was a stay at home mom and was Not Pleased with the results. But I hate waste. Plus, I hate paying over a $1 a can for pumpkin. And this time of year, we are all about the pumpkin waffles and and the pumpkin bread and the pumpkin muffins and the pumpkin casserole. And I'm surrounded by pumpkins. I had to do it. Today was the test run, I decided that I was going to be home and take on not one but two time intensive kitchen projects. I'll detail the other, making rice milk, here too.

I decided that I'd only start with two of the pumpkins because if I messed it up, I would want to try again or maybe they would go with us to Tree and PD's for Thanksgiving as decorations. I had been researching this on the internet for a while and I was disappointed to learn that I could not can these, since the acid level is not high enough (really, taking on my first canning project would have been a little ambitious for me anyway), so I needed to clear out freezer space, so I had this in the back of my mind for about two weeks, working on the freezer situation. I processed the pumpkin using these instructions. I think the key to this is an immersion blender, and the reason why this didn't work for my mother years ago. That and maybe she was using a different variety of pumpkins. Anyway, as many of you know, my mom is not a fan of immersion blenders. Basically, she feels she has a bunch of pureed food ahead of her at the nursing home and she's not going to start eating it now (no, she's nowhere near going into the nursing home, but she's a long term planner). If I had had to use a regular blender or a hand mill, this would not have been as fast, as fun, or as easy to clean up. With the immersion blender, it was all of these. While the pumpkin did take about 90 minutes to bake (I may steam it next time), the prep was really only about 10 minutes and the pureeing only took a few minutes too, so it wasn't that big of a deal. I got about 3-4 cups of pumpkin out of the two pumpkins and so that's about two cans worth. Not a great pay off, but if I had done all of them at once, it would have been well worth it. I also roasted the seeds while the pumpkin was baking. Yum!

While I was doing this project, I had another project on the stove as well. I have been considering a soy milk maker for some time. But it's about $100 - $200. Worth it for us, since we use a lot of soy milk and it would pay for itself in about 8-9 months, but we really don't have the cash for this kind of thing right now. Making soy milk by hand, sounds like a very intensive process, and honestly, I really prefer rice milk for drinking (although I love soy milk for baking some things and I'd also like to try my hand at making tofu since Nora is a complete fanatic about it). I've found several recipes on line for rice milk, which didn't look that hard to take on. Plus, I had a lot of rice bought up in bulk, so I thought, why not. I used this recipe, and while it doesn't have the supplemental vitamins like the ones we buy at the store, that's okay for us right now. Nora takes a mult-vitamin and I don't usually have a problem getting her to eat her veggies (she's a big spinach and kale eater!). I did use 4 Tbs of sugar instead of maple syrup mentioned in the article, but not the oil. I also used filtered water for the blending. This project also required the immersion blender, and again, I think it made it go very smoothly. It's chilling in the fridge right now, but my first sample tasted pretty good. Its a little thicker and rice-er tasting than Rice Dream or other commercial rice milks, but I think it will work better in baking than commercial milks do. I do like cow milk and will often drink a glass of it - I'm not sure that I will give up cow milk completely, but with enough tinkering with this recipe, I might. My efforts yielded about 3/4 of a gallon, which should last us for about a week and 1/2. For those of you who use non-dairy milks and feel like you are paying too much for commercial ones, it is well worth the time it took, it was easy, and I bet you have one cup of brown rice, water salt and sugar in your cupboard. I imagine you can use white rice too, but it wouldn't be as nutritious - but that may not be a concern. While I did have be at home for the 3 hours the rice cooked, it really only required minimal supervision of the stove and the processing took about 15-20 min, including clean up, so really this is not a bad project for a weekend afternoon. If it makes more than you feel like you can use in a week, I've found that rice milk usually freezes fairly well - of course that means that you have to have room in your freezer! I also like storing this in my fridge in glass bottles (I used a glass pitcher and a glass milk container that I never took back for the deposit). Like cow's milk, it just tastes better out of glass.