Cloudy, cold and drizzly out

Just a little weather update in case you were curious. It's been cold and drizzling for the last 2 days now. We whipped up some awesome comfort food last night. Mike made venison parmesan:I made corn chowder from the Farm and Home Journal Cookbook. (My new favorite cookbook) The recipe is so simple it amazes me how good it tastes. The more I delve into cooking as a serious hobby, the more complex and exotic the recipes get, so this was a real eye-opener. I did learn one lesson though: when using salt pork, cook it longer than you're comfortable with. It imparts a great flavor, but when you take a bite of soup and get a chewy chunk of pork fat, it's not a lot of fun. Here's a photo of the salt pork and onions. This smelled sooooo good. All I added after that was diced potatoes and some frozen corn (leftover from a party this summer) and some milk. Simple and delicious!
I've also been working with those pumpkins. We wanted to do a trial with field pumpkin vs. pie pumpkins. The pie pumpkins are much smaller than the field pumpkins. We were trying to see if it was worth going through the effort of cooking a lot of little pumpkins or if we could just get a bigger batch of pumpkin puree from one larger field pumpkin.The above photo shows the pie pumpkin cut and partially cleaned. It's a beautiful orange color. The other is an uncut field pumpkin of relatively the same size (to get a decent comparison).
The finished result was obvious. The pie pumpkin might have been smaller but it yielded 4oz more puree than the field pumpkin. The color is more pleasing and the taste and texture were more what we wanted. We'll be making a return trip to the pumpkin patch for more. I have many pies, cookies and soups to make over the winter.
On another note, Mike spent some time yesterday repairing the damage to our roof from the big wind storm we had this summer. It ripped some fascia and drip edge off over our front entrance.As if that wasn't enough, I went and clogged the disposal again. He decided to get into the root of the issue and he found an undesirable decrease in size in the pipe between the disposal and the trap. He took the whole thing apart and changed the way the water flows from the disposal to the trap.You'll notice that in the above photo his pants are soaked from the knees down. That's because he was working on the whole system while the dishwasher was running. During the dishwasher drain cycle, it sends the waste water through the disposal and Michael underestimated the pressure of the water. It showered him and parts of the kitchen with hot soapy water. I guess not every repair job goes off without a hitch. Sorry Honey.