Sometimes I bring home a kabocha, my favorite pumpkin, and split it open using a cleaver and a rubber-tipped hammer. I scoop out the seeds and put the halves face down on a Silpat-lined sheet pan to roast in a 400-degree oven for about an hour. When they’re done and cool enough to handle, I scrape the soft flesh from the collapsed halves into my food processor and blitz it into a smooth purée, snacking on any particularly meaty kabocha skin scraps. That purée goes into the fridge, ready for any pumpkin recipes I might want to make that week.
And sometimes I just pick up a can of pumpkin, because it’s good and cheap and doesn’t require said cleaver and hammer.
Either way, having some pumpkin purée on hand gets you one-seventh of the way to these pillowy pumpkin dumplings with brown butter and Parmesan, a new recipe from Carolina Gelen. Reminiscent of spaetzle, gnudi or galuska, these free-form dumplings consist of pumpkin purée, eggs, Parmesan and flour; a bit of nutmeg plants them squarely in Autumntown. The soft batter is scraped into boiling, salted water with a spoon; no fussy rolling or cutting is required. In sum: Get pumpkin, make pumpkin dumplings.
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Pumpkin Dumplings With Brown Butter and Parmesan
We’ve entered the part of the year when I try to keep potatoes on hand, stashing a bag of cute little Yukon golds next to my onions. With a package of skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs and a bunch of scallions, I basically have Kay Chun’s punchy sheet-pan chicken with potatoes, scallions and capers. The punch comes from those capers, plus a healthy squeeze of lemon.
The rest of that bag of potatoes will go into this new golden potato and greens soup, a vegan take on potato leek soup from Andy Baraghani. Mashing the potatoes in the pot as they soften gives the soup its creamy, thick texture; ground turmeric and red chile flakes add color, warmth and lift.
Sour cream is one of those things I buy without a specific plan for it, but knowing I’ll use it somehow. (At the very least, it’ll be scooped up with potato chips.) A particularly lush plan would be this roasted salmon with miso cream, a simple stunner from Genevieve Ko. Keep this one bookmarked for the upcoming holidays; “Wonderful way to have a main dish at a celebration and not feel cheated that you didn’t have meat,” writes Scott, a reader. “Delicious, elegant, beautiful, and ridiculously easy.”
Dip for dinner isn’t just a summer thing, as my wise colleague Tanya Sichynsky has pointed out in The Veggie. All you need to do is swap out a cold dip for a hot one, and Melissa Knific’s jalapeño corn dip looks like exactly the sort of molten, cheesy skillet I want to dig into on a gray, why-aren’t-you-Friday Thursday night.
Lastly: The other night my husband, staring down a bunch of brown bananas, asked me for the easiest banana bread recipe in the New York Times Cooking database. I handed him Genevieve’s vegan banana bread: no butter creaming or melting required, no fancy equipment or fussy techniques, no chance of picking bits of eggshell out of the batter. It was excellent, and now I’m on a vegan baking kick.
So next up are these vegan chocolate cupcakes, a five-star recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, adapted by Pete Wells. I’ll leave you with this reader note: “As a non-vegan, I 100 percent endorse that these are as good as any other ‘best chocolate cake’ recipe. I have my small collection of chocolate cake recipes I stand by and am quite the snob when it comes to tasting other cakes that aren’t up to snuff, but these cupcakes made the list.”
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