Beef and Turnip Pot Pie

Ground beef and sautéed turnips topped with pie crust and baked in a skillet. Hearty comfort food from the farm share.

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Can we talk about turnips? Well, it's my blog so I guess the question is rhetorical. Turnips are a cool weather crop that typically grows well for the farmers who've supplied our farm share. What grows well you tend to get in plentiful amounts.

A decade ago, before I'd ever heard of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and when local eating was the tomatoes I'd grow each summer or the fruit we'd get at a 'let's take the kids, it'll be fun' pick your own outing, I rarely ate turnips. I had no recipes that called for turnips--but if rutabagas weren't available in the store when I wanted to make pasties I'd substitute a turnip.

A single turnip, a few times a year.

Now I get a bag of turnips at least a couple times a month at the beginning and the end of the CSA season when the cool weather crops are flourishing. [Let me put it this way--if you're getting tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini you're probably not getting turnips. All other times you're getting turnips.]

Instead of fighting the turnip, I'm embracing it's uniqueness. [Somewhat like my darling Robert Barker's uniqueness.] Sometimes the turnips stand alone, like in turnip pickles and turnip fritters. Most often, though, I combine turnips with meat or other vegetables. Sometimes I have failures, like the watery scalloped turnips and salami I shared on my FB page [I'm intrigued by Cindy's suggestion to brine turnip slices to draw out the moisture before cooking]. Other times I have a success, like this Beef and Turnip Pot Pie. This is a variation on my Beef & Bok Choy Pie, flavored similarly to a pasty but using ground, not cubed, beef.

You can find all of my turnip recipes in the Turnip Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. This is a resource for folks like me eating seasonally from the farm share, the farmer's market, or grocery store specials [not that I've ever seen turnips on special but you never know]. I've got turnip recipes pinned on Pinterest--you can follow me here. For more info on how to use this blog, click here.

Rambutan Eyeballs--How to Make Real Food Halloween Treats

Want ideas for healthy real food Halloween treats? I've got some! Let's start with Spooky Rambutan Eyeballs, with fresh grapes and juicy rambutan in a freaky display.

Disclosure--I received a box of #FreakyFruits from Melissa's Produce without obligation. The rambutan used in today's recipe is from that box. I bought the grapes at my local grocery store.

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My kids were always ready to head out trick or treating approximately 17.5 minutes after returning home from school. Unfortunately for them Beggar Night hours didn't start until suppertime. That was my problem--how do I feed my kids something nutritious when their minds are focused on CANDY CANDY CANDY?

During the elementary school years we were fortunate to live in people-dense communities both on and off base. Since my kids could walk/roll around the neighborhood to meet their trick-or-treating needs I decided to host a pre-game Halloween tailgate party and invite our neighbors. Everyone could show off costumes while it was still light, we'd eat a bit of veggies, fruits, and protein to fuel the evening's adventures, and the parents could stand around drinking red wine in portable cups. 

[I enjoyed those years.]

Find this recipe at Cookistry.

Nowadays I still like the tradition of eating something festive yet . . . healthy/natural/less-processed/real/clean . . . you insert the adjective of your choice. To that end, I've got a guest post over on Cookistry where I'm sharing my Buddha's Hand Citron Feta Dip. It's savory and tangy, great for dipping crackers and vegetables and can be presented as scary or as spooky as you like. Please check out the recipe here. You'll find a bunch more ideas for Halloween snacks as well--sweet and savory, spooky and scary, kid and grownup alike!

I really don't care to scroll through plenty of photos and text that ends with a link to someone else's guest post, though, so I've got some value added today instead of just directing you to Donna's blog. 

Today's recipe is such a simple one I didn't think it merited an entire post, so I'm glad to offer you some options for other healthy Halloween ideas. Sometimes keeping it simple is just the thing. I figured these Rambutan Eyeballs would be an excellent addition to a Halloween spread. I've seen rambutan at the grocery store, and you can check out Melissa's Produce as well. Rambutan taste mildly sweet. They have a pit inside of them, so we found it easier to nibble around and discard the pit, though you could easily slice into the fruit and slice it from the pit.

Chile, Cornbread, and Sweet Potato Breakfast Casserole

A vegetarian and gluten free breakfast casserole made from roasted sweet potatoes and Hatch chiles in a cornbread and custard base. Topped with crumbled queso, this is a spicy way to start your day.

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When I get an idea for a recipe I'll think up both an omnivore version and a vegetarian version. The resulting products seem to vary widely--like my Easy Artichoke Arugula Pesto Burrata Pasta and my 5 Ingredient Butternut Squash, Sausage and Burrata Pasta or my Cheddar Apple Onion Bacon Pizza and my Apple Gouda Pecan Pizza. Today's recipe is no exception. My initial idea was to use roasted sweet potatoes from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share to make a gluten free breakfast casserole. My omnivore version was posted last year. I used gouda cheese and turkey sausage to make a colorful and hearty dish. You can find the recipe here.

I wanted to try a vegetarian version and wanted to keep it gluten free just because there are plenty of bread-laden breakfast casseroles out there, so I used cornbread. My cornbread recipe is not as sweet as some Southern ones I've had, and does not use wheat flour--only corn meal--so it is gluten free if your cornmeal comes from a place that keeps an eye on cross contamination. You can find my cornbread recipe in this tamale pie post or this tamale pie post, because I change things up, yo. Spicing things up with some roasted Hatch chiles kept it interesting.

Note: If you don't have a freezer stash of roasted Hatch chiles, no worries, check out the Hispanic section of most grocery stores. You can find 4 to 7 ounce cans of chopped green chiles in various heat levels. Choose whatever you feel comfortable with. My local grocery store gets truckloads of chiles up from Hatch, New Mexico and fires up the roaster in the parking lot. I pick up a couple of quarts each August. I use some in salsa verde and freeze some for recipes like this. You could also sub a roasted poblano if you've got some lying around looking to stay out of trouble.

For more recipes using Hatch chiles, please see my Hatch Chile Recipe Collection. For more recipes using sweet potatoes, please see my Sweet Potato Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me eating from the farm share, the farmer's market, or seasonal produce from the grocery store. Want to know how to use this blog? Click here.