Pumpkin Week 2011 : Savory Foods

Welcome to the Savory edition of my Pumpkin Week!

Today, it's all about the savory side of Pumpkin.  I've only experience sweet treats when it comes to Pumpkin, so this was totally new to me.  In fact, my husband was a little leery when I started looking up dishes that would be main courses.

First up,

Pumpkin Stuffed Shells

{Recipe found Here}

Oh my gosh....this was delicious.  And the consensus was....we couldn't tell that it was pumpkin.  Whether or not that's a good thing, I don't know.  And as you can tell, I used Manicotti shells instead of the big pasta shells {the store was all out when I went shopping}.  The filling was super easy to make, and I used a pastry bag to fill each shell up {which made it super easy}.

I also thought that this would be super yummy with an Alfredo sauce.....I might have to try it that way :)

Next,

Pumpkin Curry Alfredo

{Recipe found here}

Holy Cow!  This was definitely a YUMMO dish :)  Although, again, we couldn't taste the pumpkin, but we so enjoyed the curry flavoring.

I think one of my favorite aspects of this dish was that I threw all the Alfredo ingredients into a pot & let it all melt together....no worrying about a roux and such.

One thing that I particularly didn't like was the fact that I had to use 3 different dishes to cook everything.  If you've seen my kitchen, it's not that big, and when cooking I like to try and keep everything minimal {that's why I like one pot dishes}.  My husband was very kind though, and told me before dinner that he would wash dishes, so I guess it made it just a little bit better to dirty-up those few extra dishes.

There were things that I did different though:

• I halved the Alfredo sauce.  When I was reading through the recipe, the author had said that they had sauce leftover; I really didn't want that.
• I used an Italian blend cheese, instead of just Parmesan cheese.
• To thin out the sauce, I used some pasta water until I got the consistency that I wanted.
• I also halved the pumpkin sauce, except for the curry....my family loves the taste.
• Even though I halved the sauce ingredients, I still used a full box/lb of pasta, and it worked out fine.  Maybe a little bit too fine because we had no leftovers :)
  
  

And that was all the savory dishes that we tried, and really isn't that scary I guess.