Scandinavian Fruit Soup

This chilled soup is an excellent counterpart to a cookie tray. It provides contrasting flavors and textures without refined sugars, while still being a sweet finish to the meal. It also makes an excellent bedtime snack after candlelight services and keeps for several days in the fridge. For my third recipe of #ChristmasWeek we're heading back to Scandinavia for Fruit Soup.

Growing up, Christmas Eve was the big meal of the holiday. My folks would round up strays (folks who didn't otherwise have plans for the evening) and serve a smorgasbord of fish, Swedish meatballs (link to my folks making a batch for the blog), boiled potatoes, more fish (did I mention the pickled herring?) and lefse--that recipe is coming on Friday to round out #ChristmasWeek. 

On Christmas Eve after piling on all of the fish smorgasbord delights, we'd push back from the table and go digest somewhere. Typically us kids would play Bobby Hull hockey in the basement while the adults visited upstairs. After a period of time, we'd reconvene at the table for dessert: cookies and fruit soup. And more lefse, because you can never have too much of a good thing like lefse.

Do you get a tangerine in the toe of your stocking? I grew up with tangerines in my stocking, reading about Almanzo Wilder getting an orange in his stocking in the Little House on the Prairie series, and now we've got the Band Fruit Fundraiser citrus piled up in the basement (link to my fruit round up featuring 156 recipes using fall and winter fruits). As much as I love dark chocolate peppermint bark-coated roast beast, fruit is also an integral part of my Christmas sweets spread.

If you like to eat locally, Scandinavian Fruit Soup is your excuse to pull out the packages of beets berries you put up while they were in season. [In my case, I came across way too many packages of roasted beets in my quest to find blueberries, so beet & orange smoothies are my current breakfast drink of choice necessity]. If you don't have local fruit put up, canned or frozen fruit works great.  I'm especially partial to canned cherries--terrific flavor--and I love how the grapes in fruit cocktail look in the dark juice.

My recipes for #ChristmasWeek have been a mixture of getting my ethnic on and classic sweets that I just love to eat any time of year, but make especially for the holidays. Monday I shared Finnish Pulla {Cardamom Coffee Braid}, yesterday I shared lessons learned from making Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive, tomorrow I'll share Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Friday I'm bringing #ChristmasWeek home with Norwegian Lefse. For more of my traditional savory & farm share centric recipes, please see my Visual Recipe Index.

Swing by all the participants to see what they've been whipping up for the holidays:

Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies by Cravings of a Lunatic

Peppermint Spritz Cookies by The Girl In The Little Red Kitchen

Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls by Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts

Scandinavian Fruit Soup by Farm Fresh Feasts

Egg Nog Pound Cake by My Catholic Kitchen

Coquito Cheesecake Flan by Mind Over Batter

Mulled Wine Fruit Gums by Food Lust People Love

Soft Vanilla Caramels by That Skinny Chick Can Bake

Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive #ChristmasWeek

Need/want to make 8 dozen brownie bites for a cookie drive or a whole bunch of cookie plates? Look no further! My second recipe of #ChristmasWeek is well suited to mass production and full of chocolatey goodness as well. I share my 3 lessons learned so you don't have the failures I did.

Welcome to Day Two of Christmas Week. This event is hosted by Kim of Cravings of a Lunatic and Susan of The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen. We hope to inspire you to break out those holiday sprinkles and get your bake on!

Hanging in my house is a poster of Life's Little Instructions. On it are such gems as 'overtip breakfast waitresses' and 'when you borrow a car, return it with the gas tank full', but one of my favorite ones is 'never refuse a plate of homemade brownies'. I don't care if the ingredients for the brownies came out of a single box or from multiple containers in your pantry--to me, if the brownies come out of YOUR oven they are homemade.

What if you want to give homemade brownies to 1,500 single Airmen who are spending Christmas away from their families? Or, more realistically, if you wanted to contribute several dozen brownies to the Airmen's Cookie Drive? You need a few Mass Production Techniques to enable you to churn out tray after tray, and that's why I wrote up this post for #ChristmasWeek.

Making individual sized treats for a cookie drive is a Big Project. Making brownies for a cookie drive [is that even legal? I mean, they're not technically cookies, whatever the technical definition of a cookie is] is another level of hassle. You either need to cut your pan nice and even [no 'you cut and your sister chooses first' here] or you need to make individual brownies and get them safely out of the pan.

Lesson #1:  Use paper liners.
Trust me and the pile of failures I shared with my kids and on my FB page. [Perhaps the kids would prefer we skip this lesson and just have 8 dozen less-than-perfect brownie bites piled up around the kitchen.] To spray or not to spray the paper liners I leave up to you. I didn't spray, nor do I spray my brownie pan normally. There are 3 sticks of butter in there, for crying out loud!

Lesson #2:  If you're using nuts, GO BIG.
I like nuts in my brownies, but I'd never put nut-filled brownies in a cookie tray for my friends who have food allergies. While the Cookie Drive Organizers said that nuts were OK, I didn't want the volunteers to guess if my brownies contained nuts.  Instead, I went big and glued a big ol' pecan half on top of each brownie using a candy melt. You can see through the lid that these treats belong with the other nut-filled goodies.

Lesson #3:  Just do it. It will make you feel good.

Doing for others makes you feel good. If you love to bake, then baking for others is an exceptional way to feel good. You don't need an Airmen's Cookie Drive either--police stations, fire stations, animal shelters and hospitals would be glad to follow the instructions to 'never refuse a plate of homemade brownies'.

Are you trampled by turnips? Collared by kohlrabi? Buried in beets? For recipes using my usual suspects, please refer to my Visual Recipe Index until #ChristmasWeek ends and I return to my local food, mostly savory ways.  If you're tempted by sweets and looking for holiday ideas--yesterday I shared Finnish Pulla {Cardamom Coffee Braid}, tomorrow I'll share Scandinavian Fruit Soup, Thursday brings us Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and I'll close out the week with Norwegian Lefse on Friday.

Swing by all the #ChristmasWeek participants to see what they've been whipping up for the holidays:

Chocolate Shortbread Wedges with Pistachios by Cravings of a Lunatic

Turtle Hot Chocolate by  The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen

Rum Raspberry Tart by Cookistry

Chocolate Saltine Toffee (aka Christmas Crack) by Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts

Pecan Brownie Bites by Farm Fresh Feasts (that's me!)

Peppermint Brownie Cookies by Mind Over Batter

Bourbon Brownies by Cooking In Stilettos

Finnish Pulla {Cardamom Coffee Braid}

This is a recipe for Finnish Pulla, a cardamom-spiced lightly sweet braided bread. It is delicious plain or with butter, served alongside tea or coffee, or as an after school snack. The recipe makes three loaves which is terrific for gift giving during the holidays. 

 Follow me | Pinterest | Instagram | Facebook

Baking: art or science? Discuss.

When I first saw this bread being made it was all art: building the fire in the wood stove, mixing the ingredients until the dough looked right then braiding, decorating, and finally baking the bread. To my young, fresh-out-of-college eyes Eila Akkanen's ability to create this bread was purely magic. [Looking back on that summer, Eila was doing her weekly baking in the the farmhouse kitchen where she'd raised her family and had probably performed that 'magic' thousands of times.]

I think baking used to be considered an art, or perhaps more accurate, a series of crafts. Building a fire to the proper baking temperature is as much a learned skill as kneading dough or even beading bracelets. Nowadays I don't need to know much about building a baking fire--I use the keypad on the oven to type in the precise temperature I'd like, and double check it with my oven thermometer. I could re-learn the chemical equations which describe the reactions of a pile of ingredients turning into a loaf of bread, but I don't need to know how it works--just that it does.

I braid one side towards the middle, then the other, then finish by pinching the end pieces together.

My approach to this recipe is a mixture of science and art. Because my kitchen temperature averages 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, I use my bread machine to mix the dough [don't worry if you don't have a freezing kitchen and a bread machine, I'll provide directions for mixing the dough]. When the machine is finished, though, my experienced eye takes over and shapes the dough until it looks right.

The inspiring recipe came from Beatrice Ojakangas' book Fantastically Finnish. Instead of starting with whole cardamom pods I use the ground spice, and because I first had this while working on a dairy farm I like to use a richer milk. I have made this bread using all cream--very rich dough, very tender crumb, great way to use up 2 cups of heavy cream--as well as half & half and even 2% milk. Normally I'll say 'use what you have on hand' but if you've only got fat free milk please go grab a pint of half & half before making this. It is the holidays after all. 

Speaking of holidays, I'll be sharing sweet recipes each day during #ChristmasWeek. Tuesday I'll be sharing 3 lessons learned making Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive, Wednesday it's back to Scandinavia for Fruit Soup, Thursday we're keeping things simple with Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Friday I finish getting my ethnic on with My Mother's Norwegian Lefse. 

If you're not into sweets, check out my Visual Recipe Index for more savory ideas for what to do with the produce from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, farmer's market, and garden.

Ham Ball and Black Eyed Pea Chirashi Rice

Continuing to upcycle a holiday ham, this time into New Year's good luck, while getting folks to eat a wide variety of vegetables as well.

I am not a nutritionist nor much of an advice giver--but in my 8 years of experience with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share and 16 years of experience with, shall we say reluctant vegetable eaters [because if the child won't eat any type of vegetable, well, that's not a picky eater--you have to pick something in order to be picky, you know?] . . . .

This has been such a run on sentence I've lost the point. Let me sum up.

If you have a wide variety of vegetables in your house, you are more likely to include a wide variety of vegetables in your meals. If you include a wide variety of vegetables in your meals, the folks eating your meals will ingest a wide variety of vegetables. Because we joined a CSA, my kids eat a wide variety of vegetables.

It's a bold statement--but if I'd served this recipe to my kids before we joined a CSA, or in the early couple of years, they probably would have picked out the ham balls and the rice and left the rest. Sure, while they've spent the last 8 years eating from the farm share they've also been growing up--that happens--but the unrelenting exposure to a wide variety of vegetables is the foundation of the change. Extrapolating from the end of season survey, we got more than 40 different vegetables over the course of the 20 weeks.  That's a wide variety, and more than I would have bought had it been up to me (ahem, mustard greens, turnips, and beets I'm talking to you!).

This recipe is a great example of how having extra vegetables on hand means I'll add more veggies to our meals. It's also another way to get your New Year's good luck on without extra effort the day after the hoopla. For another New Year's Black Eyed Pea recipe, please see my Black Eyed Pea and Kale Salad in Salumi Cups.

Post Thanksgiving Thoughts

This is an unusual post for me. I thought about posting a Thanksgiving Leftover Remake recipe, but decided I've got a few of those in my index and I've been sharing links with bloggers doing Leftover Round Ups. You can see those round ups on the Rockin' Recipe Round Ups Pinterest Board.

I thought about posting a Christmas themed recipe, to help me mentally switch over to the next Big Thing. Normally I don't cotton to decorating until after my birthday, but we've had a recent mild spell and I support all my neighbors who chose to decorate outside while it was nice.  I did see a few Christmas trees in living room windows during my dog walks earlier this week though--that's a bit too much. I'd rather celebrate my spouse's birthday and my Big 5 0 before I switch over to Christmas.

As this series of photos by my spouse shows, I did a heck of a lot of cooking yesterday. I need a break from cooking! I'd say I have a turkey coma, but in fact my ancient meat thermometer broke in the drumstick, and after a small serving of breast meat w/ the main meal, I pitched the rest of the bird because I'm just not confident that whatever red fluid was in the tube is safe. I'll miss the leftovers and making stock, but there will be more turkeys in my life. We've still got plenty of sides.

Looking through these photos I think it's clear I'm doting on Robert Barker.  It's important to teach dogs about spices! He spent most of the day underfoot, on Kitchen Patrol.  Vincent joined him occasionally, but Simon mostly stayed out of it. He knew he'd be fed in the end.

I created a couple of new recipes that will be up for next Thanksgiving, including my first stuffing recipe.  This was fun to make and apparently fun for the spouse to photograph--tasted delicious too. I love cornbread stuffing and stuffing with apples and onions and to combine the two was really fun. There's no gluten in my cornbread, so it's gluten free as well.

Our menu was a roast turkey (simple as pie pizza), gravy, MA's Make Ahead Irish Mashed Potato Casserole, Alanna's World's Best Green Bean Casserole--with a couple of tweaks as I didn't want extra friend fried onions left over, Cornbread Turkey Sausage & Apple Stuffing, Creamed Spinach, Cranberry, Pineapple & Pecan Salad, and a Caramel Pumpkin Butter Cheesecake. I also have a sweet potato dish I made on Tuesday to add to my leftover mix tape plate. As I feel like cooking, I'll make a corn casserole to change up the leftovers even more.

By the numbers we had 11 pounds of turkey, 5 pounds of potatoes, 1 pound of green beans, 1 gallon of spinach, ½ pound of mushrooms, an onion, an apple, and a thing of celery.  I dipped into my stash of Roasted Garlic in the freezer, and emptied the freezer of turkey stock while I was at it. The biggest category I used, though, was dairy products.  I used 3 boxes of cream cheese, close to 3 sticks of butter, and several cups of cream over the past 2 days. Thanks again Kim for the cream! I've made a serious dent in the final Community Supported Agriculture box for the Fall season, and we've got food to feed us for days.

As for kitchen failures, I dropped a nutmeg into the creamed spinach and broke the aforementioned thermometer. I am absolutely shocked that Robert Barker didn't take down any of the meal, but it sure wasn't for lack of vigilance and effort on his part.

Things that worked well--I did a lot of 'clean as you go' today. I did this partly because I had to clean up to have room for the next item on my mental agenda, and partly because I cooked 3 side dishes using my only 2 saucepans. Either way, I'm sure glad I did--the kids did the dishes and all that was left was the gravy & the roaster when the meal was done.

Since Thanksgiving heralds in the big shopping season, I'll close with a few of my favorite things. These are all Amazon affiliate links to items I use that make my life in the kitchen just a little bit nicer. I think I need to add Meat Thermometer to my Christmas list!



This post is shared on Clever Chicks Blog Hop, Tasty Tuesdays

3 Cheese Fast-baked Cauliflower

Great for a quick fix side dish when you've already got the oven on.

I like quick to throw together side dishes and I especially like being able to use the oven while it's already warm from baking something else. This recipe combines both of my likes into a cheesy cauliflower side dish good with roast chicken, pot roast, or panade.

I deliberately don't include Thanksgiving in this list because between the bird and MA's Make Ahead Irish Mashed Potato Casserole there are enough white foods on my plate. I prefer more colorful side dishes like Colorful Roasted Squash, Potato & Pepper or Cranberry Pecan Green Beans. However, if you like cauliflower and especially if you've got some in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, this dish finishes quickly and tastes great.

I took a bunch of photos of steam and couldn't pick one. Choosy bloggers choose gif.

I made it for lunch the other day while I was baking cookies and making soup, and decided after the first bite that it was blog-worthy. We don't get much cauliflower in the farm share which is pretty good, because the males in the household aren't big fans. Indian food is the best way to enjoy cauliflower they say, and I am a big aloo gobi fan so I'd agree.  In fact, this will be the first cauliflower recipe in my Cauliflower Recipes collection (considering I've got 8 recipes for kohlrabi I think that's saying a lot).

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.

Turkey, Cranberry, and Mashed Potato Pizza

Thanksgiving leftovers as pizza toppings--mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce dotted with turkey and topped with feta and cheddar cheeses.

I'm going to share two Thanksgiving Leftovers Pizzas this month. One is for folks who don't want to make a special pizza dough, and the other is for folks who are game to try another of my new concoctions. Let's start with the easier one.

I knew I wanted a layer of mashed potatoes as the base, and after Thanksgiving I made several attempts using my Make Ahead Irish Mashed Potato Casserole. But none of my efforts with actual Thanksgiving leftovers really thrilled me, so I waited until I saw some turkey marked down, threw some other sides in my basket, and tried again.

For this particular combination I made 3 different pizzas--one without any cheese, one with cheddar, and one with feta. The pizza really needs cheese [this Beef & Broccoli pizza works without cheese, though]. I found I preferred the duo of feta and cheddar together.

You know, I don't think I'm going to type any more on this post. As I sit typing it up our newest addition, Robert Barker, is resting at my feet for his first night in his new home. I will share more of his story as I get to know him, but it's enough to say that he needs TLC more than I need to prattle on about pizza.

Macaroni and Cheese with Beet Greens and Ham

Classic comfort food with a colorful boost from beet greens and ham.

Last week on my FB page I posted a photo of the greens that were overwhelming me. My friends came to my rescue with great ideas that helped me come up with A Plan. I'm happy to report that there are no mustard greens left--except in leftovers that will be eaten at lunch. I also gave away lettuce, peppers and a kohlrabi to 3 neighbors, freeing space in my fridge for marked down milk and the box of #FreakyFruits that arrived from Melissa's Produce [more on that as I play with it--but I'll tell you that finger limes work nicely in a mustard greens kheema]. I'm feeling a lot better about using all the wonderful produce from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share.

Sometimes it is hard to be inspired  by the contents of the fridge, freezer, and pantry as a base for dinner. It's easier to grab something at the store than to remember to thaw a package of meat or a bag of pizza dough. It's easier to nuke a prepared entree than to boil noodles.  I know how I sound--because it's October, the month where sled hockey, marching band, and sewing converge to keep my family hopping in ways we are not during the other 11 months of the year. This too shall pass!

As the weeks speed by I find myself  craving comfort foods but lacking time to prepare them. As a result, sometimes for a weekend lunch we sit down to a homey baked mac 'n cheese casserole only because I finally had time to make what I'd been hankering. Cooking a few casseroles on the weekends provides leftovers for us to eat on the fly.

The inspiration for this mac and cheese came from the wonderful cookbook MELT (link to the authors' website). I first raved about this cookbook when I received a free copy and made Mac and Cheese in a Pumpkin last year. Then I made a Pasta Salad with Grilled Fruits and Goat Cheese in the spring. This book really gave me the tools to make macaroni and cheese. Now I've been schooled in the The Art of Macaroni and Cheese (Amazon affiliate link) enough to spread my wings and try a creation of my own, using the ingredients I've got on hand.

I had beet greens from our CSA farm share and I want my family to love them like I do [I'm really not content to hog them all to myself]. I had Manchego cheese left from the Swiss Chard tart and thought that the pink beet stems and ham cubes would be pretty. I'm not pink washing--I'd use beets to make the whole thing pink if I were going in that direction. I suspect you could leave out the ham or substitute sautéed mushroom chunks of chopped ripe olives if you are leaning in a vegetarian direction. [I'm feeding kids who have not yet developed a taste for olives or mushrooms so I stuck with ham.]

For other recipes using Beet Greens, please check out my Beet Recipe Collection here.

Slow Cooker Apple Chai for a Crowd (or Yourself)

Warm apple chai tea, easy to serve from a slow cooker and plenty for a crowd. This DIY Apple Chai recipe keeps in the fridge for single servings too.

In an online food blogger group we've been discussing recipe testing. From cookbook author/bloggers to 'here's what I ate today' bloggers, everyone has an opinion and we're not afraid to share it! It's been an interesting discussion.

With a recipe posting schedule of Monday, Wednesday and Friday (12 to 13 posts/month) I've got flexibility in what I choose to post. Let's take the past 24 hours as an example. I hosted a book group in my house yesterday and served Asian Pear Cardamom Cream Muffins, Asian Pear & Pear Butter Soaked Oat Muffins, Sweet Potato, Turkey Sausage & Gouda Breakfast Casserole, Sweet Potato, Hatch Chile, Cornbread & Queso Breakfast Casserole, sliced apples with Apple Cream Cheese Toffee Dip, and Slow Cooker Apple Chai.  Are the recipes on the blog yet? Um, no! I just got the dishes done! The rest will appear when it's seasonal [Hatch chiles in August, and when do Asian pears appear in the stores?].

That's 6 recipes, or 2 weeks worth of blog posts [and about 6-7 hours of food preparation, 81 photos that need to be edited, 3 sinks full of dishes to be hand washed, an additional dishwasher load, 2 extra trips to the grocery store, and plenty of writing and typing as that's part of my process. Though if we're talking hours, I started thinking about what vegetables from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share I'd have to use up--and what would go over best with my guests--about a week ago and mentally walked though the muffins and casseroles a few times before picking up a knife. I've been hacking at just this post all afternoon/evening, too, in between band fruit fundraiser captain meetings and AFO fittings, and in lieu of reading a book or watching TV. We all make choices on how to spend our 24 hours, and this is how I choose to spend mine]. 

The recipes that I share on this blog are what my family [and my book group, and my coworkers, and the high school marching band] eats each week. If it works and I have good notes on ingredient amounts and cook time, I won't make it again. [I mean, while we enjoyed Beef Tongue Nachos and Caramel Toffee Apple Parfaits I'm not going to serve them 4 times just to make sure the first 3 weren't flukes.] If a recipe doesn't work--it doesn't appear on this blog. Period. Failure photos do make it to my FB page, however. We're all human--except the spambots. Sometimes I'll need to tweak things a bit, like I did with the Double Chocolate Raspberry Muffins. Sometimes the recipe testing can go too far and I just need to stop the madness and put it on the blog already.

Too hot for warm chai?  Can I interest you in my DIY Iced Chai Tea Latte Instead?

Colorful Roasted Butternut Squash with Potato, Pepper and Leeks

Cubes of butternut squash and potato roasted with pieces of pepper and seasoned with leeks. A colorful side dish for a holiday meal or for a simple family supper.

The other day I talked about my Appetizer recipes, tooting my own horn about my ever-growing list of vegetable (and now meat and fruit) appetizers. Today I'm focused on side dishes. I can could make meals out of side dishes. Back when we lived near a Boston Market restaurant I was happy to skip the chicken or meatloaf and instead feast on greens, squash, stuffing, potatoes, corn, beans . . . whatever looked good and could be plentiful on my plate.

The suck part of desiring a variety of colorful side dishes is having to make them all. For this recipe I decided to combine a few veggies--the most colorful ones on hand--and roast them together. One cooking session that would result in a plentiful pile of color on my plate. It not only looked good--it tasted terrific, especially alongside a roasted chicken.

Over the past few weeks I've been gathering all the ingredients for a repeat of this side dish (first made--and photos shot last winter). Fall crops from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share generally keep well over a long period. In a cool dark place you can store winter squash, potatoes, and onions for months. Peppers and leeks hang out in the crisper for a few weeks--and can be frozen to use in soups and stews as well. So even if you're getting the fresh local produce in October [and you celebrate Thanksgiving in the US in November--I won't rant this time] with proper storage your produce will be ready when you're ready to cook.

I've revamped my Visual Recipe Index! For more ideas on what to do with your butternut squash, click here.

Cranberry Pecan Green Beans

Fresh green beans sautéed with Cranberry Honey Butter and tossed with toasted pecans.

Green beans are one of my standard Thanksgiving Side Dishes, and I'm reminded again how silly it seems to wait another 2 months in order to celebrate the harvest. By the time American Thanksgiving rolls around the only 'fresh' local vegetables are hardy greens like kale and long-storing winter squash and potatoes.  Everything else has been put up. The Canadians have a better plan--have Thanksgiving in October, and do it on a Monday so you have an entire weekend to prepare the feast. None of this 'last minute rush around after work on Wednesday' craziness. No matter which day you're giving thanks for the harvest, here's a recipe for you.

The green beans have been plentiful this year in Ohio. From our farmers here in the SW corner of the state on up to Meghan's farmers in NE Ohio--lots and lots of green beans in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm shares.

On a whim I decided to combine some of my Cranberry Honey Butter with some of my copious volume of green beans. [I'll be honest, inspiration struck me when I opened the freezer door and a roll of cranberry honey butter fell out.] I thought it would look pretty with the bright green beans, so I whipped up a quick side dish.

To save time and dishes, I briefly cooked the green beans in the microwave and toasted the pecans in a dry skillet. Then it was a simple matter to assemble the finished dish.  Try this one at home.

Red, White & Blue Muffins {Muffin Monday}

Roasted beets and strawberry jam provide the red, while white chocolate chips and blueberries round out the trio for a festively-colored and tasty snack

It always bugs me, as someone who thinks local produce tastes better than stuff trucked in from Off, to see Red, White and Blue recipes using fresh strawberries alongside fresh raspberries and fresh blueberries.  Why?  Wherever I've lived, those berries are not simultaneously in season.  Late spring is the time of the strawberry, and the raspberries and blueberries come along later in Summer.  If I'm going to combine berries, I'll need to use some that are put up (by freezing or by jammin') so that I can get the best flavor.

Beets are one of the vegetables that we don't devour within days of getting them in the farm share [beet greens, however, I adore and gobble up ASAP]. Beets are long-storing, though, and freeze beautifully after roasting, so in the winter I'll often grab a bag of roasted beets out to thaw and then decide what to do with them. 

Adding roasted beets to muffin batter makes a naturally vibrant result [even in savory form]. I wanted to make a colorful muffin so a beet base seemed like a good way to start. Strawberry jam for summer flavor, plus blueberries and white chocolate chips, make this muffin on the sweet side for my baking--but with only ¼ cup sugar it's still a snack I'm jiggy with feeding my kids.

For other recipes using beets, please see my Beet Recipes Collection. For other recipes using blueberries, please see my Blueberry Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. After typing so much to give you A Peek into My Process I'm going to jump right to the recipe.

Thai Turkey Cold Busting Hot and Sour Egg Drop Soup

Fight colds with this Hot and Sour Thai-seasoned Turkey, Carrot, and Rice Egg Drop Soup

 Follow me | Pinterest | Instagram | Facebook

When I was in nursing school, in a previous life, Hot and Sour Soup became my magical cure-all for any bugs picked up at the hospital that threatened to take me down.  I'd swing by my favorite Chinese restaurant and pick up a quart when I first felt a tickle in my throat, and usually by the time I'd consumed the container I was right as rain.

Of course I've moved far away from that restaurant, and had good and not as good Hot and Sour Soups in the intervening lives years.

This soup is emphatically NOT a traditional version of Chinese Restaurant Hot and Sour Soup.  Instead, it's got the hot and sour-ness that I crave when I'm sick, coupled with the consistency of egg drop soup that soothes my throat, along with carrots and rice that comfort me like a good bowl of chicken soup should.  Except this is made with a turkey carcass.  Yes, part of my Thanksgiving turkey carcass if you must know.

This is an excellent reason to save your Thanksgiving turkey carcass in your freezer until you're ready for it.  No sense wasting it on some day-after-Thanksgiving soup when you've got amazing leftovers still in the fridge.  No, save that turkey carcass, along with the bits and bobs of vegetables collected in your Soup Pack, for a Real Need.

I made this soup while in Real Need for Soup.  While I was sharing sunny orange recipes here during HashtagOrangeWeek recently, I was sneezing and hacking my way around the Disney World Parks in Florida.  As if being sick wasn't enough, we traveled to/from Florida in a plane and my ears went wrong shortly after take off and still weren't right a week after returning home.  Add to all of the above I had a cough that made me gag and, well, if you've had kids then you know there are . . . consequences . . . when you are walking around having coughing attacks.  So there I am at Disney, sneezing, coughing, and consequencing all over the place, and hoping to survive the flight home so I could make soup. /rant

Thanking again my well-stocked pantry, I slept in (love my bed) and started this soup the day after I got home.  I was inspired by Lydia's Quick and Easy Hot and Sour Soup with Tofu, Shiitake Mushrooms and Noodles and Tyler Florence's Hot and Sour Soup. Now, normally I like the hands off approach of slow cooker soup stock, throwing everything into the crock pot for a day/night before straining and using.  And while that technique is awesome, there is one drawback--in a slow cooker you don't get the flavor concentration from evaporation like you do in an uncovered stock pot on the stove top.  I cooked this stock for 4 hours on the stove top, until it was reduced by about half [and took a picture so you could see**] then called it good.  Using mostly fridge and freezer items I threw together the rest of the soup, snapped some more photos, and we enjoyed a late lunch.  I was fortified for the rest of the day. And then a few more thanks to the awesome leftovers.

If you're looking for the cold-busting properties of a bowl of hot and sour soup, the consistency of egg drop soup, the comfort of a poultry-filled carrot and rice soup--this recipe is for you.


I'm sharing more recipes on my Pinterest boards, follow me there. If you like a good peek behind the scenes like I do, follow me on Instagram. Need a good read? I'm sharing articles of interest on my Facebook page, follow me there. Want to know How to Use This Blog?

Sherried Black Bean and Broccoli Stem Soup

A smooth and elegant vegetarian soup made from humble ingredients--black beans and broccoli stems--finished with sherry and egg yolks. Unpretentious? I'm not talking 'bout wine here . . .

 Follow me | Pinterest | Instagram | Facebook

If you want to be technical, I have had a teeny tiny smidgen of formal culinary training.  When I lived in Richmond, Virginia I took a class at a local cookwares store. The class was taught by Nancy Maurelli and was all about Bean and Grain Cooking. That's where I first tasted this soup--and I'm a packrat kept most of the class handout through seven moves.  Key word--most.

The internet is an amazing thing.  From that stapled class handout I'd removed the page with this recipe since I kept fixing it for my spouse during our early years together.  I had the rest of the handout, which included Nancy Maurelli's name, so I started a quest to find Nancy and see if she still had the recipe.  In 2008 that quest paid off (interestingly, through the Local Harvest website where you can find Community Supported Agriculture [CSA] farm shares and other local foods near you) and now that the recipe is back in my clutches, or at least the clutches of my Recipes email folder, I won't lose it again.  This post is merely planned redundancy.

Since I've been reading about Julie's experiments with Roasted Broccoli Stem Dip and Meghan's experiences with Broccoli Stalk Pesto, I thought I'd share this soup.  It tastes wonderful and presents so beautifully.  The idea of garnish on a soup was awfully high falutin' to me at the time, and still is to be honest, but I do it anyway--it's easy and fun. I can't say that my kids love it--though they do eat a small bowl when we have it--but that's OK.  Coupled with a mushroom appetizer such as my Skillet Mushroom Dip for Two or Soy Sriracha Roasted Mushrooms, this makes for a lovely "just for adults" Valentine's meal at home.  Add a steak and/or a salad if you like, though don't get too full for Love!


If I suggested one of the desserts from my recipe index and intimated that we'd be eating it this year for Valentine's day I'd be lyin'--my spouse wants Killer Brownies and I love him so that's what I'll get for dessert.  Perhaps with some Salted Caramel Ice Cream.


For more recipes using black beans, please see my Beans (Legumes) Recipes Collection. For more recipes using Broccoli, please see my Broccoli Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource or folks like me trying to use up every last stitch (does this metaphor work?) of produce from the farm share box. I'm sharing soup recipes on Pinterest, follow me there. I'm sharing articles that catch my eye on my Facebook page, follow me there. For a curated look behind the scenes of the blog, follow my IG feed. Want to know How to Use This Blog?