Pumpkin recipe round-up

Halloween is nearly here! Welcome to our pumpkin recipe round-up. We love carving pumpkins but hate waste, so in the spirit of thriftiness, we've hunted out the best pumpkin recipes for you so that nothing ends up in the bin!

There's no reason to wait until the evening to get into the Halloween spirit, so start early and kick the day off with pumpkin waffles from Pasty Affair. Served with plenty of maple syrup and flavoured with warming cinnamon and spice, we can't help thinking that these would be the perfect start to any chilly autumn day.

A Subtle Revelry has come up with a recipe for pumpkin bourbon cocktails which caught our eye. This slushy cocktail combines pumpkin and bourbon with brewed black tea. We can't quite imagine how this will taste, but we do firmly believe that nothing can't be improved with a cup of tea, so we'll definitely be trying it out.

Just because you're past the years of trick or treating doesn't mean Halloween can't include a few sweet treats! The Sweetest Occasion has lived up to its name with its mini pumpkin cheesecake pecan tart recipe. Is it a cheesecake? Is it a pumpkin pie? Is it a pecan tart? All we know is that this many yummy  desserts combined into one recipe can only be a good thing!

When we said we didn't want to waste anything we really weren't kidding. Our final offering comes from House of Earnest, who've done their very own round-up of pumpkin seed recipes. One medium pumpkin yields enough seeds to make all three flavours, so you can even try them all! Sensational seasonal snacking.

Edible flowers at The Edible Flower Shop

Until now, we'd mainly dismissed edible flowers as a very pretty but rather unnecessary addition to a dish.

When we stumbled upon The Edible Flower shop and started reading all about green fingered owner Rachael's discovery of the delights of edible flowers, we started to wonder if we'd been a little hasty.

Rachael started planting edible flowers in her tiny garden, reasoning that with such a small space she might as well grow something beautiful and useful. Have upsized to an allotment, she was able branch out a little and found that there were a whole load of herbs and vegetables which produced delicious flowers, too.

Click over to The Edible Flower Shop to find out more about edible flowers and how to get started growing your own.

Video : Cheese of the month

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QV3iw_YgGMg Time for the second of our fantastic cheese of the month videos. As autumn really draws in, Ann-Marie Dyas recommends a Gruyère.

But not just any Gruyère, oh no. This is a 3-time world champion Gruyère.

Click play to find out all about what makes a champion cheese, and what to do once you've got your hands on this award-winning masterpiece!

You can see the first of our cheese of the month videos here - don’t forget to subscribe to The Simple Things YouTube channel to keep up to date!

Vegetable of the month ... sweetcorn

It's vegetable of the month time again! Our champion veggie for October is *drumroll* ... sweetcorn! We'll preface this by saying that of course, all anyone really needs to do with sweetcorn is slather it in butter. Boom - delicious. However, that doesn't make for a great round-up. So, if you're in the mood to branch out a little, read on ...

First of all, how pretty and lovely is Naturally Ella's sun dried tomato and sweetcorn risotto? Very, is the answer. This recipe makes sweetcorn look a whole load classier than we ever imagined it could. Rustic, hearty and perfect for a nippy October evening.

Another option for a simple sweetcorn supper is Love and Olive Oil's sweetcorn ravioli recipe. Home-made pasta is little labour intensive, but absolutely worth the effort once in a while. Show off your hard work with pared-back and delicious flavour combinations - fresh herbs, rich ricotta and a light white wine sauce.

Another fan of the sweet-corn/creamy cheese pairing is Naturally Ella. If we had an 'interesting party nibbles we'd like to try' list, her sweetcorn and cream cheese potstickers would be at the top.

For a casual lunch with friends, A Couple Cooks has come up with a recipe for sunshine yellow sweetcorn muffins that could brighten up the dullest day. Serve with fried root veggie crisps for all the colours of autumn on a plate!

Finally, we need to give an honourable mention to a recipe which sounds totally barmy, but received so many rave reviews on foodie blogs we couldn't ignore it any longer. That recipe is ... (wait for it) ... sweetcorn ice-cream. Click over to Cook Republic for a how-to, and let us know if it's as ridiculous as it sounds!

Video : Cheese of the month

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV3iw_YgGMg Ann-Marie Dyas from The Fine Cheese Co. is The Simple Things' resident cheese expert. Each issue, she'll be sharing with us her favourite cheese of the month.

The Simple Things team are huge cheese fans (could you tell by our choice of launch party venue?!) but we're the first to admit we're not exactly experts.

In contrast, what Ann-Marie Dyas doesn't know about cheese isn't worth knowing! Her enthusiasm for her produce at The Fine Cheese Co. is so infectious we knew we had to get her involved in The Simple Things.

In this, the first of her cheese of the month videos, Ann-Marie shares with us her favourite goats' cheese, plus a delicious looking (and super-easy to make!) supper idea.

Don't forget to subscribe to The Simple Things YouTube channel to keep up to date with all our latest videos!

Apple butter recipe

This apple butter recipe is perfect partner to the dee-licious rugelach we shared in our firework night feature in issue 2.

Rugelach is a bite-size pastry filled with spices and chewy dried fruits - perfect for a nippy firework night. Any kind of jam can be used for the filling, but for a wholehearted autumnal flavour, nothing beats apple butter.

Our recipe of choice comes for one of our fave baking blogs, apt 2b baking. Baker Yossy ropes in friends to help her make a big batch every year. Check out the apt 2b baking blog to see how she does it.

Have any of our readers tried our rugelach recipe? Let us know how it went and don't forget to Tweet us a pic!

Chocolate Week 2012

Chocolate Week starts on Monday 8th October, and we are licking our lips already.

We're all massive chocoholics in the Simple Things office, so we were very excited when rumours of Chocolate Week reached our ears. A whole seven days dedicated to our favourite sweet treat? The right side of swimsuit season? Events all over the UK? Sign us up!

If you can make it down to London, the grand finale Chocolate Unwrapped, with top British chocolatiers, demonstrations, and lots and lots tasting opportunities is a no-brainer. If not, check out the Chocolate Week website for more info on what's going on near you.

Book Launch : My Berlin Kitchen

We've been feeling the Berlin love ever since reading all about Sandra Juto's experiences of her city in The Simple Things issue 1.

Luckily, tying in neatly with our feature is the release of The Wednesday Chef Luisa Weiss' My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (With Recipes).

As you'll have gathered from the title, this is not just a cookbook, but a memoir of Luisa's journey so far, punctuated with the recipes that defined these different phases in her life.

In her own words, from when Luisa first decided to put pen to paper:

'I'm moving back to Berlin and I'm writing a book, about Berlin, about my life, about cooking and home and family and love, about being divided and finding a way back to being whole again, about a city and its recipes, and a girl who's learning how to find her way.'

Blackberry buckle cake recipe

This blackberry cake recipe makes the most of blackberries, which are at their juicy, inky purple best right about now.

Blogger Sarah from Lemon Fire Brigade baked this cake after a day out berry-picking with her family. Her snaps made us want to drop what we were doing immediately, pull on some wellies and track down the nearest blackberry bush.

Sarah has mixed together her blackberries with blackcurrants, which are also in season at the moment, and created a recipe with a high proportion of berries. This makes for a very beautiful cake (she calls it tie-dye style, which sums it up pretty perfectly), and provides a tart counter to the sweet vanilla sponge.

Do you have any favourite berry recipes? Share below!

How to make your own butter

At The Simple Things, we think that sometimes it's worth putting a little extra effort in to make something everyday a little more special.

With that in mind, take a peek at this recipe for homemade butter at Longest Acres. The instructions require no specialist equipment and are so simple, they made us wonder why we'd never tied this before.

We're planning on having a go at this when we next have a free hour. We're daydreaming of toasted English muffins spread with butter made with our own fair hands, eaten tucked up in bed on a lazy weekend morning. Totally idyllic.

Illustrated Bites

When Heather Diane's herb illustrations popped up on our Pinterest feed earlier this week, we instantly fell in love. Californian artist Heather combines her love of food with her talent for drawing to create quirky illustrated guides to all of her favourite foodstuffs.

Our favourites are her latest edible flower design and super-pretty herb guide . Check out heather's website for more illustrated loveliness.

Vegetable of the month ... courgette

Champion of the veggie patch this month is the courgette. Join us as we round up our fave recipes for you to get stuck in to...

Kicking off our collection is Gourmande in the kitchen's raw courgette ribbon salad which we'll be trying out while there's still a little summer warmth in the air.

This salad was born when garden-less blogger Sylvie offered to help take some home-grown courgettes off her friends' hands - what a good Samaritan! We love that it requires barely any ingredients. A little dressing, some crunchy pine nuts and crumbled goats' cheese are all that's needed to make the courgette shine.

When the weather starts getting a little chillier, Cafe Johnsonia's spicy courgette wedges will be just the thing to warm us up. Blogger Lindsey 'made this up as she went along' and assures us that we can do just the same. We're thinking cumin, garlic and a little paprika...mmm...

Finally, we had been hunting out courgette cake recipes for this post, but when we came across this beautiful harvest cake on Roost we just had to share it with you. This recipe combines courgette with apple and carrot, and is sweetened with honey and vanilla cream. We think it'll taste as wonderful as it looks.

Do you have any favourite courgette recipes? Share 'em below!

Remember to check out the rest of our vegetable of the month series.

Book launch : The Sprouted Kitchen

For a little while now, the top food blogs have been buzzing with excitement over the latest cookbook to hit the shelves - The Sprouted Kitchen, by blogger / author Sara Forte and her talented photographer husband Hugh.

The Sprouted Kitchen has a very similar attitude to food as The Simple Things - in their own words, the book collects together 'ideas for cooking with seasonal produce, and simple, tasty, wholesome dishes for family and friends'.

If you want a bit more a vibe of that it's about, check out the Happy Yolks blog, where there is an absolutely gorgeous little video to accompany the book.