Sautéed Greens with Cranberry and Pistachio

Brightly colored and fresh tasting, this side dish of sautéed cooking greens with dried cranberries and crunchy pistachios is sure to satisfy. Great alongside roasted meats or mashed potatoes!

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Talking with my friends who've eaten from Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm shares, a few frequent comments stand out:

• "The flavor of fresh foods is amazing"
• "I never knew I liked _________ (insert a new-to-them vegetable here like kohlrabi or beets)"
• "I'm not used to eating all these greens."

It's this last comment I want to address today.

I'm finding that my family is more likely to eat greens if I keep throwing greens at them. Not literally, though. If I literally throw greens at people, Robert Barker happily eats whatever lands on the floor. Simon flees from the leaves in terror, and Vincent grabs one, refuses to eat it, but will defend--to the pain--his right to keep it in his bed. Anyway, I serve a lot of greens during the cool weather crop season. Salads (chopped, rinsed, spun and packed into wide mouth jars for easy access) appear alongside most entrees when we've got salad mix of lettuces in the farm share box. Stir fries (like my Colorful Chard and Chicken Stir Fry or my Orange Teriyaki Slaw Stir Fry) or smoothies (like my Peanut Butter, Spinach and Banana Smoothie or my Kale, Date, Banana, and Peanut Butter Smoothie) appear if there are members of the beet and cabbage families in the share.

Matcha Monkey Bread with Pistachio

This overnight sweet brunch bread is a perfect way to start off a St Patrick's Day celebration. Delicately, naturally, green from matcha powder, this monkey bread is rolled in pistachios for flavor and crunch.

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I like to celebrate holidays with food, even if it's not a holiday I claim as my birthright. I'll make Pumpkin Cranberry Maple Kugel even though I'm not Jewish, and Corned Beef, Cabbage & Dubliner Pizza although my People went a viking to the Emerald Isle then returned home to Scandinavia. It's fun to celebrate with food, especially colorful food. Recently I shared an attempt at green muffins that did not work out exactly as I'd hoped--even if they were tasty!

One surefire way to have naturally-colored baked goods is to make the dough ahead of time, letting it rest in the fridge. This allows the color to deepen, and has worked for me with several Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share vegetables. It seems, in my experience, that a cooked vegetable as part of the moisture for a yeasted dough results in vibrant breads. My two favorite examples, so far, are my three color Mardi Gras Braided Bread and my bicolor Overnight Sweet Potato Pecan Monkey Bread. Today's recipe is a fusion of those two--taking the green matcha dough from the Mardi Gras bread and baking it in the manner of the monkey bread. I kept up the green theme by using pistachios in place of pecans, but this recipe remains inspired by the book Make Ahead Bread by Donna Currie.

Apricot Pistachio Matcha Muffins #MuffinMonday

Chunks of dried apricots and chopped pistachios flavor these delicate green tea muffins for fruit and nut muffins with a twist!

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Since I bake muffins many times a month (I think our family's Friday Night Pizza Night pizzas are the only items I fix more consistently) I like to play around with themes. I was going for a festive St Patrick's Day muffin here--naturally green colored with chunks of orange to echo the Irish flag. Clearly, I'm not Irish, but I'm happy to eat and drink and celebrate anyway! While I admit I failed with the color, the flavor of these muffins makes them worthy of a Muffin Monday post.

After my success with naturally coloring pizza dough green with spinach, and naturally colored green, gold, and purple braided Mardi Gras bread, I figured green muffins would be a cinch. However, something about the quick nature of muffin batter does not lend itself to the deeper colors, I'm afraid. Much like my Beet Horseradish Muffins, the batter color bakes out into an orange muffin with a tinge of my goal color--green. But hey! No artificial dyes in these muffins so there's something to hang your . . . apron . . . on!

Robert Barker remains hungrily hopeful that I'll have a catastrophic accident on the way to the oven.

If not a vibrant green color, what do these muffins have to offer? Simple--they are a refreshing fruit-and-nut muffin, great for breakfast or a snack. We prefer them served warm with plenty of butter. They're lightly sweet, with a nice bit of crunch from the pistachios and a tender bite from the apricots.  They're unexpected--I've been craving raisin walnut bread and these muffins are a faster way t get that fruit/nut flavor while my bread dough was rising . . . and rising . . . and rising. [Yes, I baked a loaf of apricot walnut cinnamon chip swirl bread while also making these muffins. I need to work on my swirling technique, but boy does the toast hit the spot!]

If you'd like to make a non-traditional nod to St Patrick's Day, give these a shot. After all, you can't eat corned beef and cabbage for breakfast . . . or can you? I went there with these Corned Beef Hash Waffles, so I suppose you can.

Trail Mix with Leftover Halloween Candy for #Choctoberfest

Got leftover Halloween candy? Mix it up and stretch it out with fruit and nuts for a {Leftover} Halloween Candy Trail Mix.

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Do you buy the Halloween candy that you like, or do you buy the Halloween candy that will not tempt you? [Does anyone actually like Bit-o-Honey?]

When I moved to Ohio I realized that, unlike the 4th of July, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas or New Year's, the day that Halloween is celebrated is not set in stone. Around here, some towns have their kids trick or treat on the weekend before October 31st for reasons that have escaped me. [Let's celebrate Thanksgiving on a Sunday, hmm? That actually makes sense, so you're not working all day long and then pulling the best American meal of the year out of your ear 24 hrs later.]

Our town always celebrates on the 31st, which means that many years our flat, well-lit, sidewalked town with houses close together is overrun with 'people from off' coming to double dip on their trick or treating. I am quite curious this year, as Halloween falls on a Saturday, to see what reasons folks will invent to come trick or treat in our town. It's possible folks will keep to their own towns, and in that case I'll need to change up my game. See, I usually buy candy I DON'T want to have leftovers of, so I am not tempted into additional snackage.

Using an overgrown volunteer zucchini and other squash for our jack-o-lanterns.

As a side note, I've got kids with peanut and dairy allergies on my block, so I always have 2 bowls of candy: one that only contains nut- and dairy-free packages (i.e., pure packets of sugary goodness) and one that may have nuts and/or dairy. I've got signs on each bowl, and often kids thank me. Consider doing that yourself.

Black Raspberry, Goat Cheese & Pistachio Salad

Intentional salads . . . because not all fathers celebrate Father's Day with slabs of grilled meat.

We are in our 10th season of eating from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. You'd think I've got this down. You'd be wrong. The 2 most recent CSA programs we've participated in, here in Ohio and back in Virginia, provide us with bags of salad mix. I like that. Because I have salad mix stand by, ready for a quick rinse and tear, I'm more likely to say "dinner is X, Y, Z and a salad". Except the best intentions go awry and we don't end up actually making that salad. We just eat X, Y, and Z instead and the bag of salad sits untouched.

That was before I started making Intentional Salads. I am sure that the idea is painfully obvious to most everyone else, but if one person reading this has thought "and a salad" and NOT followed through, then my work here is done.

My spouse and I started craving salads around March. With months to go before CSA season we'd hit the salad bar whenever the craving struck. Over time, I began to notice which salad bar items we preferred on our salads. Since he is vegetarian-while-deployed my spouse has had years . . . yes, years . . . of experience building deployment salads and knows what he likes. I'm game to try new things and new combinations.

When the farm share began last month, I gathered the salad bar-type toppings that we liked the most and stored them in the fridge. The idea was that we'd set up a mini salad bar with dinner. That idea bombed. Too much hassle. Too many utensils. However, having chef salad for dinner and setting up the mini salad bar as dinner works great. I slice up some ham and set out all the jars and containers and we go at it making up our own plates.

Garlic Scape Pistachio Pesto Hummus

Garlic scapes, basil, parsley and pistachios combined in a traditional hummus base for a fresh Spring dip. Garlic scape pesto freezes to have this seasonal treat year round.

For other recipes using Garlic Scapes, please see my Garlic & Garlic Scapes Recipe Collection. It's part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for seasonal eaters faced with a staggering amount of fresh produce we just don't know what to do with. I've got a Pinterest board of Garlic Scape Recipes here, and a Round Up of 28+ Food Blogger Recipes Using Garlic Scapes here. Want to know how to Use This Blog?

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Part One: The Making of Garlic Scape Pesto

To paraphrase Dick Van Dyke's Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ("Don't waste your pucker on some all day sucker.  And don't try a toffee or cream.  If you seek perfection in sugar confection, well, there's something new on the scene") don't waste your scapes in some Spring stir fry, instead try this pesto, it's green.

When I read Annie's post about garlic scape pesto I was intrigued.  I'd never tried it, but it sounded good.  When my CSA farm share and my garlic bed provided me with garlic scapes I knew I'd give it a try.  As it turned out, I didn't follow my own directions for stocking up on pesto supplies before the garlic scapes appeared.  I did have a block of parmesan, but I didn't have any pine nuts.

I got to thinking . . . why do I have to use pine nuts in pesto?  Weren't the original pesto makers just using what was readily available to them, not sourcing to China to make a sauce? (Check your bag of pine nuts, you'd be surprised)  I mean, I had great success using almonds and cashews in my Fresh Tomato Pesto.  In my pantry I've got almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and sunflower seeds available--I chose pistachios for this just because they are green and would enhance the bright green of this garlic scape pesto.

[In fact, I had a lil' ol' pestopalooza party with all the garlic scapes and fresh herbs after my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share resumed--that flood of green after the long winter was so welcome--sure, the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve provided some lovely orange veggies, but man, I missed getting a big ol' box of leafy veggies each week!  I made pesto using garlic scapes and sun dried tomatoes.  I used basil and parsley for the leaves. I used pistachios and sunflower seeds for the nuts.  I wrote down the various combinations, but my favorite is the one I'm sharing below--garlic scapes with pistachio nuts and basil.]

Because I plan ahead, and will be putting up this pesto by freezing it, I keep it a little thicker by using less oil.  By freezing this pesto, the plant cell walls that weren't disrupted by the food processor will burst, resulting in a more liquid pesto when thawed.  If you're not planning on saving some for later, use more oil.