New Mum’s Food Adventures

Recently moved house. We bought a lovely home and after getting sort of settled in I have been cooking a lot. Today I made some pumpkin and spinach brown rice but I added some cream cheese. I needed to use it up and I wanted a nice creamy flour and touch to the recipe. I kept it basic. Two cups uncooked brown rice cooked the day before, two and a bit cups of roasted pumpkin. I bought a quarter cut of Kent pumpkin and it made just over two cups. Two cups of stock, extra salt as needed and pepper with a generous sprinkle of dried oregano and one red onion because it’s the onion I had. Kept it simple. The focus was the pumpkin. I sautéd the onion until a little golden and translucent in olive oil. I added frozen spinach because it was affordable and once it came to temp and smelled fragrant. I added some salt, pepper and oregano before I dumped in the roast pumpkin in without skin. I just baked it whole and scraped it off the skin into a bowl. Nothing fancy. I have trying to remove pumpkin skin so I always cook the skins on it and remove after or eat it. I stirred it around a bit first to get the herbs all through the pumpkin and slowly added my vegetable stock. I use Massels salt reduced vegetable stock. Then once everything was bubbling I added half a brick of cream cheese. I use Philadelphia lactose free cream cheese. Once it started to mix in I added the rice. The rice helps mix in the cream cheese better. The friction of the grains makes it easier to stir in and make it lovely and creamy.

We offered it to our toddler. A taste of the creamy pumpkin soup part first. He was very interested which surprised me as he has been super fussy lately. He thoroughly enjoyed the brown rice. So I was really happy to see him having fun with his food and enjoying it too. Surprised he liked it so much. If I were to do this again I would definitely add garlic and rosemary or if not rosemary then some fresh sage.