Homemade Culinary Art When You Need It

Art is sometimes where you lease expect it but can come together when you need it.

I meant to take a picture of the 23 mini pumpkin bread loaves that I baked for my book group ladies but alas, in my rush to package with little time to spare, I missed taking the pic. Instead I’m including a picture of them all packaged — using my local butcher’s Butcher Block brown bags. You can tell how much we frequent this place right up the street and this is only a quarter of the bags that I’ve saved with the intention of returning them someday. Glad I hadn’t recycled them yet. I had just enough to use in the same size.

With no extra cost for these gifts, I used fresh pumpkin from the large Halloween one I had that surprisingly had not gone bad by this time. It all started because I wanted to show my son how to bake it since we had a conversation about pumpkin bread and he didn’t remember me making it this way back in the heyday of my motherhood. This 12 pound pumpkin supplied about 20 cups of fresh pumpkin to use. I only used the small container we filed with 4 cups for this effort. I was happy to have packaging on hand to use to as gift wrap and voila. Often times such serendipity cannot be planned.

I think they came out pretty nicely, considering both the pumpkin bread and the make-do-with-what-you-have-on-hand packaging were not planned as gifts until they happened — a little scrumptious artful surprise. Plus, I really like my new Butterfly Mirrored Trays that I found on sale by Three Hands.  I was inspired to get them after my mother-in-law showed me the lovely one she had from her mother — authentic vintage and more interesting and even well made than these, however. I had to glue on the bottom mirror edge of the blue butterfly tray after it arrived unhinged. I looked on the back and it was made in China. Ugh. There was no way to know this while ordering online but they are pretty.

Now, the question is what to do with the other 16 cups of pumpkin?!