What to Bring to Holiday Gatherings Pull Apart Pumpkin Bread!

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Several weeks back we were standing in our kitchen, enjoying a glass of eggnog, and discussing the upcoming holiday travel season.  "What should we make for all these family gatherings?" we asked ourselves, since gathering and potluck are nearly synonymous in the Midwestern dialect.  Katie showed off her googling skills and came up with a recipe for Pull-Apart Cinnamon Sugar Pumpkin Bread with Buttered Rum Glaze.  The recipe is amazing, but the name is quite a mouthful, so weve started calling it just that pull-apart pumpkin bread.

Another feature of our family gatherings is that the food is always fresh, which means that the kitchens of all of our relatives are always occupied in the days leading up to the event...which puts anyone traveling across the country to be there at a certain disadvantage for making a fresh dish themselves.  Katie hypothesized that it would be easier to find oven time than whole-kitchen time, so she devised a plan to make up the dough ahead of time, freeze it for the cross-country trip, then let it thaw in the fridge overnight upon reaching our destination, and bake it early in the morning right before everyone woke up. (...woke up to the smell of fresh pumpkin bread, that is!)  Weve had mixed success with that approach since our yeast doughs that have been frozen or refrigerated for extended periods often dont rise quite right, or at least do so quite slowly, which makes the time needed difficult to predict.  But, were happy to report that this recipe appears to be amenable to the extended freezing/refrigerating regimen we put it through!  Heres what we did:

First, we browned the 2 Tablespoons butter, added milk, and let it cool to ~115 °F.  Then we added the yeast and 0.25 cups sugar, and let it proof until it looked bubbly on top like this.

While it was proofing, we measured out the pumpkin, salt, and 1 cup flour.  Hey, look!  Weve got two different kinds of pumpkin in there!  One must be from a can and the other from a real pumpkin.  Weve found this recipe is a good way to use up pumpkin left over from making pumpkin-flavored eggnog or pumpkin/squash butter.

We mixed in the pumpkin, salt and first cup of flour, then added the rest of the flour bit by bit while kneading in the mixer, then let it knead for another six minutes.  The texture is like a really soft bread dough.

Then we let it rise for an hour or so...

...formed it into loaves, and put it in the freezer for a few days.

When we got home for the holidays, we thawed the dough in the fridge, then tore off and golf ball-sized chunks and smooshed them flat before coating them in the butter-cinnamon-sugar-nutmeg mixture.  Then they got stuffed into a greased bread pan like the photo shows.  Any sugar mixture left over after patting as much as possible into the rolled-out dough got sprinkled on top.

We let it rise in the oven until the top of the loaf was just at the top of the pan, then started baking it.  The first time, we learned the hard way that its better to put a pan underneath to catch any drippings, otherwise the baking stage doubles as a smoke alarm test.

When it was done baking, we added the last mix of butter and sugar, this one accompanied with milk and rum.  We have yet to see one of these loaves survive for more than six hours out of the oven.  In fact, our families are more often like pumpkin bread piranhas--when provoked, they can skeletonize a loaf pan in under two minutes!

For the detailed recipe amounts and other instructions, check out the original posting on SunnySideUp.

What do you bring to your holiday gatherings/potlucks?  Let us know in the comments section below!

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Franciscan Sister Wins Food Netwoks Chopped Contest Seeks to Bring Attention to Issue of Hunger

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"Perhaps being on national TV and winning this competition will bring some attention to the issue of hunger and to the reality that Gods love is so strong and so big, he can take this little nun from Chicago who never went to culinary school to compete. ... Literally nothing is impossible with God." -Franciscan Sister Alicia Torres

Sister Alicia Torres, 30, is one of the new generation of Catholic nuns. She has her own Twitter account and she appeared on the Food Networks reality cooking show Chopped--and won!

Sister Alicia, who lives and works at the Mission of Our Lady of  the Angels on the west side of Chicago, was one of four chefs cooking with the typical makings of a conventional Thanksgiving dinner—turkey, green beans, potatoes and cranberries—on the special volunteer edition of the show.

In the appetizer segment of the contest, Torres transformed leftovers into Mexican-style quesadillas.For the entree, Sister Alicia made a Mediterranean-style dish with curry turkey, a sweet potato cranberry hash and a dipping sauce with goat cheese and green beans.

Here is what she wrote on Twitter on the day of the contest.

Chopped = major blessing + joy! Im still cooking .. for Gods glory and my friends on the West Side! Thanks @FoodNetwork! #Chopped

— Sr. Alicia Torres (@NunRun) November 12, 2015

Sister Alicia is a member of the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist, which serve the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels, located in Humboldt Park, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. "With the economic crisis, families and seniors in the area do not have the necessary resources for sufficient heat and nutritious meals," the mission said on its website. 

The mission  distributes food and clothing to residents of Humboldt Park on Tuesday mornings. The first Saturday of the month, the mission also serves as a model of how to efficiently run a mobile food pantry. The mobile pantry provides food and clothing for approximately 300 families.

Sister Alicias victory brought a prize of $10,000 for Our Lady of the Angels. More importantly, it provided her the opportunity to shine the spotlight on hunger and poverty on the west side of Chicago and in many places in the U.S. "Perhaps being on national TV and winning this competition will bring some attention to the issue of hunger and to the reality that Gods love is so strong and so big, he can take this little nun from Chicago who never went to culinary school to compete. ... Literally nothing is impossible with God," Sister Alica said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune.

And here is a video from an interview with Sister Alicia on WGN television in Chicago.



Siser Alicia was featured in the film Light of Love in 2013, a movie by the Imagine Sisters Movement, in which she discusses her religious calling.

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