What Are Your Favorite Autumn Recipes?

An Apple a Day and In a Pumpkin Shell by Jennifer Storey Gillis

Autumn in the North East (where I live and work) is a great time to pick apples and pumpkins, paint and carve pumpkins, and make apple pumpkin recipes with kids.

So this week, when the toddler and I went to the library, I picked up a copy of In a Pumpkin Shelland An Apple a Day!by Jennifer Storey Gillis. These small, square paperback books are quick reads with easy-to-follow directions of more than 20 pumpkin and apple projects to do with kids from a former elementary school teacher, Jennifer Storey Gills.

In An Apple a Day! the author shares a collection of fun and healthful projects using apples includes instructions for creating apple puzzles, wreaths, prints, and apple-head clowns and rules for such apple games as bobbing for apples and apples tosses.

In a Pumpkin Shell the author shares how to grow the very biggest pumpkins, design pumpkin-seed jewelry, solve pumpkin word games, create musical instruments out of pumpkin seeds, how to carve jack-o'-lanterns, bake maple pumpkin cookies, how to serve pumpkin soup in a pumpkin bowl, and so much more.

Here is a recipe from In a Pumpkin Shell by Jennifer Storey Gillis:

Raisin-Pumpkin Cookies

You will need:
2-1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup cooking oil
1 egg
1-1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup mashed, cooked pumpkin
2 cups raisins

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a cookie sheet.
2. In a large bowl, sift together the flour, salt, baking soda, nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger.
3. In another bowl, combine the vanilla, oil, egg, brown sugar, and pumpkin. Beat well with a wooden spoon.
4. Add the flour mixture and the raisins tot he pumpkin mixture. Stir well.
5. Drop spoonfuls of batter into the buttered cookie sheet. Don't put cookies too close together, because they spread when they are cooking.
6. Back the cookies in the preheated oven for 20 minutes or until they are lightly browned. Let them set on a cookie sheet for about two minutes after taking them out of the oven, then place them on a rack to cool.
7. Pour a big glass of milk, and enjoy!

Other fun books by Jennifer Storey Gills include: Green Beans and Tambourines, Puddle Jumpers, and Tooth Truth.