It's hard to describe the feeling I get when I desire to cook something (especially when it's a baked item) and I look up a recipe and realize that I have ALL the ingredients already on hand. Even spices.
When this happens I go back in time in my mind to the day when John and I went grocery shopping after we received our first deposit of food stamp money when John first started law school. We received an extra half month worth of food stamp money because once you are approved, they give you money from when you first applied. So we had an extra $200. I thought to myself "this would be a good time to stock up on all those spices that I never have!" I think I bought just about every spice you can get at a regular grocery store. So to this day when I look in my cabinet for Coriander I pat myself on the back and say "what a smartie I am".
Today I had the hinckering for pumpkin bread. Probably because I bought 2 large cans of pureed pumpkin back in November with the intention of making it during all the pumpkin-i-ness. I never got around to it because of school... til now. So away I went on the laptop in search of the perfect recipe.
I found one that looked a little strange to me. Some of the ingredients were coriander, cloves, cream sherry and walnuts. "Too many ingredients!" I thought. I get overwhelmed with too many ingredients. But as I searched other recipes, I was confronted with other weird ingredients and decided to come back to the above mentioned recipe. I looked through my cabinets and had ALL the ingredients. Even walnuts, and even cream sherry.
Cream Sherry... some of you might not know what that is. Let me go back in time again. Over a YEAR ago, John was very into being my personal bar tender. This prompted him to buy not-so-common ingredients such as bitters, martini olives (which really have no other purpose than to put in a martini :-P and we STILL have those in our fridge) and cream sherry. Cream Sherry is basically a dessert wine. But it has VERY complex flavors, lots of sugar, and is very high in alcohol. I believe we tried the cream sherry by itself... in a wine glass. We hated it. It pretty much sat in a cabinet til this day. I pulled it out to see if it was still "good" and asked John for his opinion. John poured a little in a glass to taste it. Now, mind you, our taste has matured greatly over the past year... After taking a sip John said "Wow, we were out of our minds. This is delicious".
So anyway, I excitedly whipped up this recipe. Two things: I used Canola oil instead of walnut oil (because that's what I had, and there's not much of a difference) and used this batter to make pumpkin bread muffins- to help with portion control. So here's the recipe. Try it out! Maybe with a glass of cream sherry. John says the muffins go very well with it.
2 cups white sugar
1 1/4 cups light brown sugar
1 cup walnut oil
1 (29 ounce) can pumpkin puree
4 eggs
4 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup cream sherry
1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease three 8x4 inch loaf pans.
In a large bowl, beat together white sugar, brown sugar and oil. Stir in the pumpkin. Mix in the eggs one at a time, beating well with each addition.
In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, coriander and salt. Stir dry ingredients into pumpkin mixture until smooth. Stir in cream sherry. Beat till thoroughly blended, 1 to 2 minutes. Fold in nuts. Spoon batter into 3 greased 8x4 inch loaf pans, filling no more than three quarters full.
Bake in preheated oven until a tester inserted into center of a loaf comes out clean, about 65 minutes. Let stand 5 minutes in pans before turn out onto wire racks to cool completely. Can be kept at room temp. for 4 days or frozen.
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