On this early-June morning, we were staying in Ross, Tasmania. It was cold enough for frost to have formed on the backs of the sheep in the paddock behind our lodging. Look at a map, and you'll realize how fairly close we verge on Antarctica!
Just down the road from this bakery, we were staying in a "lodging" built in the mid-1700s; it was once a butcher shop. On one of the original boards still on a wall were numbers, scrawled in pencil, referencing sales. This was a building with virtually no heat but what we could build in a fireplace in a living room and one wood stove in the kitchen area. We had an electric heater for the bedroom, but I think we couldn't put it on until other electricity was off or it would have blown a fuse! But it was "Hands-Down Quaint", and that uniqueness makes traveling fun!
So about Pies and Pumpkins? In this shop (On the tray, unbaked, and leaning against the hearth, baked, are "Pies".) Until we went to Oz, we have never had "pie" that wasn't filled with fruit and cut in a wedge. But THESE pies! It was Love from the start...all those delicious meat flavours! I know of no place around here where we could hope to find anything so good! "Pumpkin" was the other novelty to *all* of us, each in our own way! Traditional American Thanksgiving ends with at least one Pumpkin pie. "Sweet * Pumpkin"??? Exclaimed our friends?! (We're thinking, "How else?!") THEY, in turn, introduced us to Pumpkin Soup (a novel idea to our minds...and not popular in the states then like it is now!) Well, I was taught how to cut and peel a pumpkin and make soup! To date, and since then, I've made far more pumpkin soup each year than any pumpkin pie! My recipe was found in a heart-healthy cookbook for Ginger-Squash soup; *Heaven*! My friend who thought she wouldn't like pumpkin pie, slathered on the whipped cream and called it "Heaven" as well!
Lovely story about pumpkins. For me they're definitely for soup or pasta. Nothing sweet. ;-) Although I have had the opportunity of sampling pumpkin pie.
