Sweet-and-Sour Pumpkin Pancakes
Not entirely sure what y’all do while you’re laying in bed trying to fall asleep, but if I’m not engaged in imaginary time travel then I’m thinking about food. It’s a different food most nights, but it’s generally still food. Sometimes this backfires and I have to get out of bed for a snack before I get back in bed to continue thinking about food. On this occasion, it was pumpkin. That happens a lot this time of year, though admittedly most of those thoughts revolve around pumpkin getting the shaft in favor of mixed spice. Hardly anyone even knows what pumpkin itself tastes like! In my quest to showcase pumpkin without mixed spice, I made a personal commitment long ago to never create a recipe that hits that “pumpkin spice…” yuck. Ever. But this of course means y’all get non-spice pumpkin creates to try out!
In the fall, I generally buy 5 pumpkins. Sometimes a couple of other squashes, but there are a large number of pumpkin varieties and they’re like Pokemon to me where I need to catch/try them all. We eat, on average, 5 hard squash per year, though, and typically none of that goes into pie. Instead, they get stuffed with all manner of things, as you saw last week, or become shells and ravioli filling (clearly a recipe I should repost for next week). Sometimes I make pumpkin muffins (no spice!) or bread (ditto!), and other times I want to fry cubes into other dishes, curry them, or even just mash with herbs and cream to replace potatoes!
Often, I tend to cut pumpkins into slices, still with the peel on, and flash frozen before bagging. This way, I can have as much or little pumpkin as I want, when I wanted, for the very low price of putting some in the sink to thaw. I usually do 4x1” slices for maximum diversity in options and also so I’m never stuck having to use up more pumpkin than I’d like to. I’ve dehydrated and powdered the flesh before, too, and I like to replace up to 1/4 cup of regular flour, per cup my recipe needs, with pumpkin flour in baked goods. So that’s also an option for y’all to use to diversify where pumpkin enters your diet, too. You also can grill slices of pumpkin, if that sort of thing appeals.
As least one of these squashes will get a soft spot, because I buy them in October but don’t usually open the last one until early summer. Whenever that happens, that squash becomes Item Number One to use up! So it was with this pumpkin. The seeds, per always, were cleaned for roasting. When I had dogs, I used to blend the peel to offer as a treat. The peel is edible for humans, too, but we tend to find its texture, even cooked, off-putting.
I thought about a number of options for this specific pumpkins, including pumpkin stir fry, putting tiny pieces of squash and scallops in raviolis instead of a mashed-type filling, and then I thought about pancakes, and I decided that's where I needed to go with these little 1/2 inch cubes. Instead of putting the pumpkin in the pancakes, I decided to put it on the pancakes.
You can use any pancake recipe you like, boxed mix, or whatever other method of pancake making you prefer. This topping also is fine for ice cream.
Here’s what you’ll need
1/4 cup butter
3 cups fresh pumpkin, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup each: brown and white sugar
juice and grated rind of each: lemon and some kind of not-sour orange
1/2 teaspoon salt
Here’s what you’ll do
Combine butter, pumpkin, and salt in a skillet and cook over medium-low or medium heat until squash starts becoming soft. Add remaining ingredients and cook down until thick the sauce is thick with chunks of fully cooked pumpkin in it. Your pumpkin sauce should be thick enough to have some good viscosity to it, but still thin enough to pour with the squash onto your pancakes or ice cream or whatever.
