Baking Day Tuesday: pumpkin

It's baking day Tuesday again.  Last Tuesday was pretty boring, so I didn't write about it.  Today turned out a bit different.  I discovered that I am out of wheat flour.  I do have wheat and a grinder, but I'm still working up the courage to actually figure the darn thing out. 

It's an old magic mill.  I remember my mom using it when I was a little girl.  I find it funny that all these new skills I'm learning are really old skills that she had, but some of them kind of got lost in the middle somewhere.  She would make a huge batch of bread.  I remember getting to help punch down the dough with her.  I thought it was so fun.  Then, financial troubles made it necessary for my mom to go to work and she was no longer able to make bread.  The wheat grinder was moved to the basement, where it stayed until my sister took it to her house.  She eventually bought her own mill and the magic mill was back in my mom's basement for a bit before I carried it off.  The instructions are long gone, but the mill is still in great shape.  I'm just too scared to use it.  Yet.  Next week maybe.

I did have a bag of bread flour with a few cups left in there.  It has been sitting on top of my flour bins for several months now, annoying the heck out of me.  I move it to the wheat flour bin when I need white flour, then back again when I need wheat flour.  Every once in a while it makes it to the sugar bin, but no more.  I used it in some pretty plain loaves of white bread. 

We needed a break from the same old recipe anyway, and this was one I had never tried.  Then, as I was throwing the empty flour bag away, I noticed a recipe for hearth bread on the back.  It looks fun.  Wish I had seen that before I started these.  Oh, well.  They taste just fine with some nutella slapped on there.

But, baking day is not over!  My husband is threatening to throw out the pumpkin that has been on our entryway stairs since Halloween.  I've been meaning to get to it for months now, so no time like the present.  It's baking right now, after which, I will scrape out the "meat", puree it, and freeze it.  My daughter saw me working on the pumpkin and was instantly jumping up and down begging me to roast the seeds, so those will go in next.  They sound kind of good on this cold January day.