Spicy Broccoli Rabe Deep Dish Pizza

Pan pizza stuffed with broccoli rabe tucked under a blanket of spicy sausage.

And now, for something completely unrelated to Thanksgiving. In honor of my spouse's birth month I'll share this pizza. It was his repeated requests and encouragement that caused me to try making a deep dish pizza in the first place. [Or NOT making one, as it turned out in the first place though I did get the hang of it the second time around.]

I've been making deep dish pizzas in my cast iron skillets at least one Friday Night Pizza Night a month, using whatever's fresh in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. Thanks to the long season of cool weather crops I feel I can still share this now--and I need a break from the holiday recipe palooza. This pizza is definitely a break from Holiday Hoopla. The spicy sausage kicks ya in the teeth asserts itself and the broccoli rabe manages to hold its own.

If any vegetable could hold its own in a fight, those in the broccoli family sure get my backing. They do so much to make us not want to eat them! However, the Happy Caterpillars which remind me that my food has not been sprayed with pesticides sure enjoy eating them. It's not just caterpillars that hitch rides in the farm share box. A ladybug and a striped beetle came in the other day with the dill. I could write a whole post on The Critters We Find In Our Farm Share but I just made a collage instead.

I'm noticing that the posts I'm writing the past few Thursday nights, for publication on Fridays, are short. I'll blame it on the dog. It's like having a toddler in the house--though a toddler that you can lock in a crate when you go to bed or to the store. Hopefully I'll be spending tonight at the library for NaNoWriMo being productive. In the meantime--for more recipes using broccoli rabe, please see my Broccoli Rabe Recipe Collection. For more pizza recipes, broken down by vegetarian or meat or fruit toppings, please see my Visual Pizza Recipe Index.

Cranberry, Orange and Beet Salad (make it ahead in the slow cooker)

Making cranberry sauce in the slow cooker? The house smells terrific and you've got the stove free to make yet another side dish. Adding oranges, beets, and a kick of ginger? Lovely. Thanks to Alanna and her reader Karen for the inspiration.

I'm trying to squeeze the Thanksgiving side dish recipes in as fast as I can, along with some suppers to tide you over and use up your Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) turnips ahem goodies, like beets. I've been tossing beets into all sorts of savory meals lately. Beetza (my friend Dave's name for the Roasted Beet and Arugula Pizza) and Beetloaf (which isn't up on the blog yet) to name a few. However, the sweetness of a locally-grown beet really shines in something like cranberry sauce. I've got experience with this--last year I shared an alphabetical Apple/Apricot, Beet and Cranberry Sauce.

I typically roast the farm share beets before I have a plan for them. Scrub a bunch of beets, place them in a foil packet with a splash of olive oil, slide the packet onto a baking sheet. Bake in a 400 degree oven for an hour or until the packet 'gives' when you squeeze it. Sometimes gigantic beets can take nearly 2 hrs, but 1 hr is a good time to check. Let the packet cool, the slip the skins off the beets and chop to the size you desire.

Six ingredients--so simple!

Free time to play in the kitchen seems to shrink like the amount of daylight, so any time I can throw a pile of ingredients into my slow cooker and let it do the work for me I'm happy. When I read Alanna's Homemade Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce for the Slow Cooker I was inspired. Cranberry + Orange is a great combo. Beet + Orange is another great combo, like in my friend Meghan's Beet Mimosa. The idea that I could add beets without turning the whole dish a naturally unnatural color [ahem, like the Beetza or Beetloaf] was a big draw. Cranberry + Orange + Beets for the win!

I've got a little 1.5 qt slow cooker which is perfect for this application. It's also perfect for heating up leftovers while I'm ferrying kids around, so I recommend this size appliance as more than a 'one note' space waster.  Something like this Slow Cooker (Amazon affiliate link) with an added Keep Warm function, works great for soup or sloppy joes and holds enough to feed our family.

I struggled with the idea of naming this a sauce. It's not really sauce-like. Come to think of it, neither is cranberry sauce. It's really more of a guideline salad. When I looked up the definition of salad I read about a cold concoction of vegetables, fruit, and/or meat.  I figured that definition applies to this dish, so I'm calling it a salad.

If you've got beets, consider throwing some of them into this salad. It keeps for a week in the fridge, and although the execution was a failure, the concept of adding it to a rolled pizza as shown at the bottom of the post [come! Look at my failures!] is a good one. For other recipes using beets, please see my Beet Recipe Collection.

Roasted Sweet Potato & Turkey Sausage Breakfast Casserole (Welcome Costco!)

A gluten free breakfast casserole full of hearty roasted sweet potatoes and turkey sausage topped with gouda cheese. No need to assemble the night before and take up space in the fridge--this throws together fast and goes straight into the oven.

I get so much mileage out of having roasted vegetables on hand. Each week as I empty the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share box into various locations around the house--the refrigerator for the greens and most vegetables, tomatoes on the counter, and potatoes, onions, and winter squash in the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve--I plan a time to roast some veggies just to have them standing by.  Usually I'm roasting beets, knowing that eventually I'll find a way to use them. I hope. This time, however, I knew I wanted to have blobs of color [note to self that will be left in the post--really, blobs? maybe something more appetizing?] in a breakfast casserole so I roasted a mess of sweet potatoes as well.

I roast my sweet potatoes by peeling, cubing, tossing with a teaspoon or so of olive oil and spreading them in an even layer on a piece of parchment paper on a rimmed baking sheet. I put them into the oven, turn it on to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and let them go about 20 minutes. After that I stir them, then roast in 10 minute increments (usually just one increment) stirring each time the timer dings until they are tender. Depending on the size of the cubes, they are done in 30 to 40 minutes. These keep overnight in the fridge.

This breakfast casserole is not really a 'make ahead' type.  I have a hard time finding room in my fridge for those pans anyway. There is no bread to soak--it is naturally gluten free. I didn't want to wake up, peel, and roast sweet potatoes and then assemble the casserole before my book group arrived. It was easier to get the sweet potatoes prepped while dinner was in the oven and pop them in to roast since I already had the oven on. Using precooked sausage links meant that it was simple to dump everything in the baking pan, top with cheese, pour the eggs over top, and slide into the oven. The pan, not me. I'm too big for my oven.

I've got a vegetarian (and also gluten free) version of this casserole coming up later. I'm sharing this recipe now because a Costco store is opening up in my neck o' the woods this week (I bought both the turkey sausage and the gouda cheese at Costco) and because I think it would be great to serve guests over the holidays.

How do I shop at Costco if there hasn't been one near me for the past 3.5 yrs we've lived in Ohio? Sled hockey! October through March my son has hockey practice Monday nights an hour away from our home. One of the things you just deal with in disabled sports, I suppose. I find ways to enjoy the outing--like shopping at the Costco or Cincinnati Asian Market that are located a few minutes from the rink. I'm glad to have a closer source for my Costco staples April through September though.

For other recipes using sweet potatoes, please see my Sweet Potato Recipe Collection.