Roasted Sweet Potato Nachos

Layers of roasted sweet potatoes seasoned with salsa verde, black beans, salsa and even taco meat if you've got it--all tucked under a blanket of cheese and baked until bubbly. Serve with tortilla chips for a tasty vegetable appetizer, another Awesome Veggie App {link to my Pinterest board}.

It's time for the Game!

In our family, that could mean Ticket To Ride, Sushi Go!, Qwirkle, Timeline or our newest find, Black Fleet (all game links are Amazon affiliate links). Several years ago, after repeated failures attempts we became a family who plays games together.

We don't play Candyland or Monopoly. To be honest, I never found those games particularly enjoyable and thought I just wasn't the type of person who liked to play games. I was wrong. It wasn't me--it was the games we had. If you'd like to have a blast playing games together, read on. If not, jump down to the nachos.

How did we become a game-playing family? My spouse. His engineer brain took on the task after my efforts failed, and he has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Over the holidays we had 12 people around the table, 3 generations, ages 14-86, laughing to the point of bladder control issues while playing Telestrations.

Telestrations is a combo of Telephone and Pictionary. Each person gets a drawing pad and a list of words. You read a word, draw a picture to describe the word, then pass your pad to the next person who writes a word based on your drawing. That person passes it to the next, who draws a picture based on the word they see, and so on. We bought 2 games so we'd have enough drawing pads for everyone--it's great for large group.

The Board Game Family is the blog where my spouse discovered our first successful games. Check them out here. Once you know the style of game that you like to play, you can find new ones yourself. We've had great success with Spiel des Jahres winners, and now enjoy cooperative as well as competitive games each week. It's great fun--yes I'm saying this about sitting around the dining room table playing games with my teens--and good for our mental and emotional health as well.

We don't feed our games, so the table gets cleared off, hands washed, and food put away before the games come out. If you're interested in another sort of game--say, you wanna watch football while eating these nachos--be my guest. They're certainly yummy and would work for that sort of game too.

For other recipes using sweet potatoes, please see my Sweet Potato Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index for this blog.

Swiss Chard Sauté

Swiss chard stems and leaves quickly sautéed with a bit of onion and finished with a splash of vinegar. This side dish goes with a variety of meals and uses a large bunch of chard.

Buy ALL the vegetables!

Eat ALL the rainbows!

If you haven't seen Hyperbole and a Half's hilarious post, This is Why I'll Never be an Adult, (which provided me the inspiration for the intro to today's post) please do yourself a favor and pop over to read it. You can find it here, and I'll wait patiently while you read.  I've got a cup of tea handy.

Have you ever gone shopping--at the farmer's market, the grocery store, or Costco--and been struck with the desire to EAT ALL THE RAINBOWS? You buy more vegetables than your fridge can hold, convinced that this time, THIS TIME will be different and you'll magically find room for it all and eat everything before it spoils. That's the problem--buy too many bags of potato chips and they'll keep wherever you find space for them. Not so much for bags of Swiss chard. 

I rarely shop at the farmer's market since my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers do such a terrific job of keeping me in fresh veggies from June into December (and then I do a pretty good job of keeping myself in veggies for the intervening months, eating up the veggies I've put up in the freezer, the pantry, and the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve). Mostly when I hit the farmer's market I'm picking up honey, maple syrup, and the occasional mushroom. If I didn't have a CSA, though, I'd routinely come home with more produce than I could store.

This side dish is great for when your pile of new veggies exceeds your available fridge space. [While I'm doing my weekly post-CSA pickup vegetable triage, I leave Swiss chard on the counter. A lovely large bunch takes up so much room that I may as well sauté it up and serve it with dinner.] It's fast, requires very few pantry staples, and goes with a variety of entrees from fried eggs to Beetloaf. While it is a simple recipe, it's great to have a fast, easy, and basic cooked greens side dish method in your back pocket [next to your phone].

For other Swiss Chard recipes, please see my Swiss Chard Recipe Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index.

Winter Squash & Banana Muffins {Monday Muffins}

Working title Asante Sana Squash Banana Muffins*, these soaked oat, wheat and flax muffins have roasted winter squash with banana and maple syrup for sweetening. Like other banana-containing baked goods these are terrific the next day and make a great breakfast or afternoon snack.

I'm not a control freak in the kitchen. I usually welcome all the help I can get [and I'm still enjoying the fruits err vegetables of my niece's and nephew's labors over the holidays when I had them chop up what turned out to be 5 recipes worth of mirepoix aka onion, celery, and carrot. Oopsie. Well, Faster Kirsten miscalculated but appreciates the effort nonetheless. Tak, Albert & Astrid.] Sometimes, though, the help is not entirely helpful. 

Unless your kitchen is populated by creatures who haven't figured out how to open the fridge door or who haven't mastered lifting the lids off containers, you've probably experienced a 'helpful' and hungry kitchen assistant 'cleaning up' the leftovers that were actually planned overs. Perhaps you intended the various parts of the meal NOT to end up all in the same container [because, you know, the light sucked at dinner and you wanted to photograph your leftover lunch for the blog]. 

The addition of flax into my standard soaked oatmeal muffin recipe came because of a helpful kitchen mate. My spouse dumped a bunch of ground flax seed into the container of rolled oats, thinking it would boost the nutrition of his morning bowl of oatmeal. He was not quite satisfied with the results, so I offered to take the rest of the container off his hands despite knowing I couldn't use any of the results for the blog [he didn't measure the amount of oats remaining in the container nor the amount of flax he dumped in with them]. After making muffins, waffles and more muffins I decided the combination is pretty useful, so once I'd emptied the container I played around with the amount of flax seed and came up with this version.

I've made these muffins three times now, and even shared them with the terrific physical therapists working with my son. It's been a while since I've posted a Monday Muffin recipe [like, last year, man], so I figured I'd kick off 2015 with these. Since I'm using maple syrup and a banana for sweetening, if you've made any resolutions regarding granulated sugar these would still fit in with your goals. If, like me & Meghan you've still got a pile of winter squash in your basement . . . well, here's an idea of what to do with it that the family--and the physical therapists--approve.

For other ideas using Winter Squash, please see my Winter Squash Recipes Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient.