Autumn Cookery

This morning I baked blackstrap molasses gingerbread with all the remaining flour in the house; a blend of buckwheat, whole wheat, and barley flours. I found a recipe in my Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook and adapted it. It's good with tea and coffee. Now I'm baking a chicken Laurie Colwin style; at 350 degrees, slow , slow, slow, and baste, baste, baste, with a whole lime in the chest cavity. Laurie Colwin wrote two of my favorite cookbooks; Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. I love to read them at bedtime because I find her writing soothing. I bought my big chicken today at the Asian American Store. I hadn't planned on chicken in fact I went in to buy tofu and bean sprouts and instead I bought a chicken and a fresh pineapple! I'm baking my chicken sprinkled with paprika and Kosher salt and black pepper with a lime and four whole bulbs of garlic all jammed into my covered Dutch Oven. I'm baking pumpkins; seeded, sliced in half, face down on my cast iron skillet on the top shelf. And now that they're done I'm roasting the pumpkin seeds.