At the end of the last bear story there was this teaser photo of a mini loaf of bread:

With the not quite 1 cup of pumpkin from my last pumpkin roasting, I decided to try Oatmeal pumpkin bread from page 100 of Artisan Bread in 5 minutes per day…my high moisture dough “Bible”. I highly recommend this book if you want to try the high moisture thing….aside from good recipes there are lots of instructions, troubleshooting and info that helps understand the why and how of working with high moisture dough. And understanding some of the why and how helps if you want to experiment. And if you experiment some things work and some don’t and the book info helps you tweak things so they DO work…I speak from experience :)!

But for this dough, I followed the recipe exactly.

For the bread, I followed the adaptation on page 102 for Oatmeal Pumpkin Seed bread – almost…I used sunflower seeds instead of pumpkin seeds because I wasn’t thinking or reading carefully. In this case a “mistake” that worked fine!

This little bread was as good as it looks. And the dough – it rises wonderfully. This is not a sweet cake like pumpkin bread ala banana or zucchini bread. It is very slightly sweet as there is a little honey as well as pumpkin in the dough. It is a whole grain bread: half white flour, but the remaining is a mix of oatmeal, whole wheat and rye flour.

The cranberry seed variation made a wonderful roast turkey sandwich. And black forest ham was good on it also.

It made excellent toast.

I made an apple hand pie with the same dough on Saturday morning. It smelled so good and was sitting there with a bit of carmelized apple and cinnamon so I ate it!

No photo.

But, on Sunday, I decided to add some sausage to the apple so I could call it breakfast. I drizzled a little maple syrup over all before sealing them up.

A bit of egg wash and they are ready for the oven.

The hardest thing about making this kind of thing is waiting for it to bake and cool enough to eat.

My kitchen floor is nearly always sticky or crunchy or both. So I cleaned the floor. 10 minutes down, 20 to go.

Tick-tock.

Worth. The. Wait.

I made a mini loaf without cranberries and seeds.

And then I was out of dough.

The big green squash are “winter squash”…I think. I looked at a number of photos, conferred with my mother…we think they are winter squash. They are wonderfully flavored. I like them better than pumpkin – the texture is smoother and they are just a bit sweeter. Most of the flavor we associate with pumpkin stuff is the spice combo. If you’ve ever tried plain pumpkin, you know it is nothing like the flavor of a pumpkin pie.

Second round for the dough, I thought I’d try some of the winter squash in place of the pumpkin. Not a risky experiment and the only difference I detected was that the goods are a tiny bit sweeter. I am not talking sweet like a cake or or cookies…just a bit sweeter than a plain dough.

Since bagels are a plain dough with a bit of sugar…

This dough makes wonderful bagels – crunchy outside, chewy inside.

On to “English” muffins and pizza. The muffins are cooked in a cast iron skillet. I did as I always do…a little cornmeal on them, a bit of olive oil and butter in the pan and a lid on top: 2-3 minutes per side.

Keeping with the pumpkin/squash, sausage and apple theme, for the pizza I spread a thin layer of squash for the sauce, thin slices of mozzarella, then sausage and apple slices. Fifteen minutes on a stone on the grill, a drizzle of balsamic syrup (reduced balsamic vinegar) and it was pizza for supper!

Nice crispy crust with just a bit of chew – perfect!

Wonderful, delicious, beautiful dough with a taste of Fall.