pumpkin bread & a new job

A lot of new things are happening at the moment, friends.  Besides a new pumpkin bread recipe.  

It started, I suppose, with this blog.  This thing I do in my spare time that seems a little weird, to be honest.  I mean, I spend hours cooking and baking, photographing, photoshopping, writing, and posting about my dinner?  And I don't make any real money to speak of from my efforts?

I've struggled with my label as a food blogger.  It's been a challenge for me to own it, to wear the tag proudly and loudly.  Self-promotion on my part was practically non-existent for the first two years of this blog's little existence, as I shied away from telling people what I was doing with my life.  But people have noticed.  Not a ton of people, mind you, but enough.

Enough for me to become employed as a gluten-free/dairy-free baking instructor and healthy meal planner and personal chef/cooking instructor (that's what I'm calling myself, anyway, in lack of an official title). 

It's a part-time gig, definitely not a replacement for my early mornings and paper bag fees in the grocery world, but I'm being compensated for my knowledge and for something that I love to do.  I have a marketable skill, people.  

Who would have thought that these past three years of cooking and baking in the blogosphere would have led to actual employment in the field I've been a daydreaming wannabe in for so long?  

The best part about it is that my employer came calling to me.  I've never been sought after before.  What an amazing feeling!  Here I was, content with my plans to complete the program at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and hunker down at the grocery store for the next year, when... oh, hello... opportunity came a knockin' at my door, and now I get to spend part of my week planning recipes that I get to execute with clients, for money.  

I know I'm talking to you as if you don't know what a job is, but it's seriously been like this in my brain as I process what it is that I'm actually doing.  It's a little bit hard to believe.

But I'm working on that.  Believing.  A little bit of that stuff, remarkably, goes such a long way toward achieving.  

And in celebration of that achieving, I'm sharing with you one of the first recipes I've developed for my new job.  This pumpkin bread is both gluten-free and vegan, and it's a wonderfully moist and flavorful addition to the repertoire of pumpkin recipes I've been hurling at you, as of late.

So go ahead and cut yourself a slice, and relish in your own accomplishments.  What are you waiting for?

Pumpkin Bread

makes 1 loaf

gluten-free, vegan

¾ C. sorghum flour
½ C. tapioca flour
¼ C. potato starch
1 C. brown sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. baking powder
½  tsp. salt 

1 T. pumpkin pie spice
½ tsp. guar gum
1 C. pumpkin puree
½ C. melted coconut oil
3 T. maple syrup
3 T. water 

1 T. ground flax seed

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Lightly grease a 9”x4” loaf pan, and set aside.

• In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the sorghum flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, pumpkin pie spice, and guar gum.

• In a separate large mixing bowl, stir together the pumpkin puree, coconut oil, syrup, water,and flax.

• Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients, and pour into it the wet ingredients.  Stir until just combined.

• Pour batter into prepared loaf pan, and bake in the center of the preheated oven for 40-50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

• Allow to cool in the pan for 20 minutes; then use a knife to gently loosen bread from sides of pan, and invert loaf onto a cooling rack.  Allow to cool completely before slicing.

• Store bread wrapped loosely in plastic in the fridge for a few days.