Pumpkin Muffins

(A few weeks back I posted about a cooking challenge. This is a continuation of that)

I’ve started out cheating. But I guess if it is my game then I get to make the rules. So it is now a new rule that it has to be a smitten kitchen recipe but it doesn’t have to come from the cook book. I had a pumpkin and this last trip up to Karamoja I searched her whole book and the only pumpkin recipe is Marbled Pumpkin Gingersnap Tart which looks and sounds wonderful but I can’t even begin to list the things I don’t have up here from cream cheese to a tart pan. The rules of this game allow many generous substitutions as long as the intent of the recipe remains but for this one it would have been lost. Maybe in Soroti it will be possible. But back to the pumpkin. So I found a recipe on her online list for pumpkin muffins. I wrote it in the back of the book and decided it was perfect. Muffins can’t be cooked in my cooker so it became sweet bread loaf. But dang, after four hours of work it really hit the spot. And the upside is that it is a recipe that the ladies here can replicate. My afternoon plans fell through and earlier the ladies from the “women’s union bakery” had seen what I was attempting and so with the extra time and left over pumpkin they also made two loaves.

It really was a lot of work though. The pumpkin alone took two hours by the time I got the fire hot enough and boiled the pieces until soft and then cooled and shelled it. (Do you shell a pumpkin?  Seems like it. Wasn’t there a nursery rhyme character who “…put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well.”?)  And baking here is more time consuming too. Fires just don’t maintain heat the way an oven does and needs frequent tending to keep the coals hot enough. But as long as time allows it is usually worth the work because there isn’t anything else even comparably nice to eat here. 

Peaking at it in my "oven".

Esther giving it a try.
 

The women's union cooking theirs.