yet another try

hmmm

hi just trying again.

turkeyalaking

I'm trying to see if I can get my pictures up yet. If there is nothing just ignore it, i'm trying.
Have a great weekend!
whoohoo a storm!!!!!!!!!!

Turkey ala King

yumm yumm, it tasted great with turkey and on a nice bun.

Comfort Food

It's been a couple of weeks since I took the bus and walked home from work. Even walking quickly with my nordic mittens from mom and cat hat from Eppie, I was still cold. All I could think about was biscuits and gravy on the walk home. I managed to thaw most of the lamb under cold running water and made Dad style gravy (thickened with cornstarch), it hit the spot.








I tried making Olibollen (with some modifications) two weekends ago and failed miserably. I don't like to waste so much oil on one batch of food so falafel was had yesterday.




You can see the Gingerbread Houses that were made during Fun Day last Friday. I wanted to keep them all to decorate the house!

brussels sprouts, again

I cook em up once a year. And while I'm hesitant to say I like them, each year I do find something more and more palatable to make with Brussels sprouts. This year I halved and roasted them with garlic. Then I mixed them with bacon, caramelized onions, sage, squash cubes, and a sauce of cream, white wine and mustard. It was my best effort yet!! I'll even say I liked it!

pumpkin chili cupcakes

More pumpkinny fun! I made pumpkin chili cupcakes. They have a bit of ancho chili in them and a tasty chocolate frosting. Here's the recipe, http://www.gildedfork.com/pastryprincess/2007/10/cupcake-round-up-2.html
Check out this fun recipe for Coffee and Doughnut cupcakes! http://cupcakeblog.com/index.php/2007/09/doughnuts-and-coffee-cupcakes/

prize winner #2

Here is tonight's dinner. A grilled sharp cheddar, apple (ashmead's kernal- a tart russet) and caramelized onion sandwich with squash lentil soup.

The sandwich was another REAP recipe contest winner- and it's good! Working from home makes making bread and caramelized onions pretty easy. Sometimes I don't know what I'm going to do with what I'm making, but I'll figure it out or give it away instead.

The soup was made with squash and puy lentils and a ton of spices: cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, coriander, cumin, kala jera, paprika, fennel seed, pepper, cloves, allspice, saffron, cardamom, and galangal and orange peel. Then it still didn't taste very good- I think because I didn't have stock so I had to use water. So I added pomegranate molasses and kalamata olive tapenade. Then it was good!

virtuous pumpkin pie

The other night we made fish tacos and krispy kale for dinner. (the krispy kale was great Rach! all flamage was avoided) We made a black bean and corn salad to go with the fish. Tasty tasty dinner.

Dessert was punkin pie! It matches rachels virtuous souffle. I lost the rubber ring for the blender, so we put the pumpkin through a ricer. Some of the squashes I have squish right through it, but the pie pumpkin I had was crazy stringy so it would barely go through the ricer. And sometimes because we were pushing so hard to get it through, some bits of pumpkin would make it through and go flying. Anyway, good fun. We ended up with a tasty pumpkin pie, definitely more texture than canned pumpkin, but the flavor was excellent. And pie, as always, is an awesome breakfast
.

White Yam Ravoli

On Friday Stephen & I made up a white yam ravioli with a mushroom, sage cream sauce. The yam took a solid hour and a half to bake. To make the filling we mixed it with ricotta, nutmeg, salt and pepper. The sauce was shallots, mushrooms, sage, paprika, salt and cream. The texture of the filling was not smooth and made for a nice contrast to the cream and soft mushroom sauce. It was surprisingly yummy.

Tonight I made a yummy "old fashioned cinnamon sugar cookie". I think it's called old fashioned since the batter is made with sour cream - very similar to a hermit cookie without the fruit. Simple and delicious.

hummm diddy he he... hua hua

Hi guys, well I have been cooking a lot lately, I just forget to take pictures. This is an squash, apple, fennel soup I made last week. It turned out delicious! It had chopped fennel bulb and ground toasted fennel seed in it. The garnish is apple "matchsticks", there is apple in the soup also. The biscuits were a recipe from the Herbfarm Cookbook, they have wheat and white flour and cornmeal in them (also called for rye but I didn't have any) Good and hearty.

We finally bottled Matt's peach wine from back in July. It smells pretty yeasty still, but it has good potential to be tasty. We'll try it in a few months.

And, I thought you might like to see where Catfish sits when I'm cooking...

Pizza

Yummy yummy,
We made homeaid pizza. I made the crust!
green pepers green olives pepparoni
and corn meal on the bottom.
Happy Weekend
~sAraH

A Day of Cooking & Baking

It's been busy lately and I haven't had much energy for cooking. Today I made up for it. I made buttermilk pancakes (Martha Stewart recipe of course) for lunch and Chicken and Dumplings for dinner . While Dads Chicken and Dumplings are still great I now prefer my method.

Chicken and Dumplings my way. Skin the chicken and cut into six pieces (two legs, two wings and cut the chest cavity in half). Boil in water for approximately 20 minutes - until the meat is done. Take the meat off the bones and through the bones back into boil for at least another 30 minutes. Strain the stock and add a whole celery bunch cut up and a good portion of a 5lb bag of carrots thinly sliced and the chicken meat. Boil for only 15 minutes. Add dumplings on top cover and simmer 15 minutes. With this method nothing is mushy and the chicken is not stringy.

I've been craving homemade bread so I baked a loaf of Oatmeal bread. My refrigerator is also full of apples so I made two loaf pans of Brandied Apple Spice Cake - tiz yummy. Also I started on the gingerbread houses for my friends to decorate at Fun Day - you can see the pictures. I finished 10 roofs and 10 front and backs - no side walls yet - later.

After visiting mom yesterday we dropped Sarah off at work. I wanted to buy a loaf of bread from her and settled on the Finish Sourdough Rye. She couldn't cut it for me because it would bread the machine! It weighted 3 lbs! Anyway after smelling it in the car I decided it needed some dill havarti and turkey just like open face rye sandwiches at Twig Church Potluck - it was a fun diversion.

Fuyu Persimmons

They're not bad! In fact, they're pretty tasty.

I have a fruit CSA for the winter- it's not locally grown but it is a random selection of in-season fruit from around the country grown on small farms. This week was my first installment and I got some local luscious pears, Valencia oranges, avocados, apples, (pink lady variety- which I'd never had because I don't buy apples in the store, but they're good!) and persimmons.

I wasn't too excited about the persimmons but after reading up on the variety- Fuyu, I found they are supposed to be eaten while still firm. Hachiya persimmons are eaten "when they feel like a water balloon" and I'm pretty sure that's what we had as kids. These Fuyus are good! The texture is pleasant, the flavor is good, and they are very pretty. I ate half of one straight and then I pureed the other half and used it to try and fix my experiment from yesterday- a macaroon type cookie made from cooked wild rice. It's not been a raging success but oh well... I'm happy to discover that Fuyu persimmons are pretty good.

salads

I've been eating a lot of salads recently. Which is a really new thing- I've been pretty scornful of salads in the past because they are just so boring and such. But the friend I mentioned who doesn't eat raw veggies, he particularly laments that he can't eat apples in salads anymore. So I thought, well yeah, that sounds pretty good and I've got a jillion apples. But really, I found the key to good salads.

Kalamata olive tapenade/olivada. Mix it with a little more olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and mustard and it's a truly delicious salad dressing. I've had it with apples, raisins, walnuts, red pepper, spinach, romaine, hard boiled egg, tomato, crutons, carrots, etc. Not all at the same time mind you.

This is the salad I had tonight- yep it's as enormous as it looks. It's spinach, lettuce and blanched kale with bacon, apples, paprika peppers and radish with the dressing above. Gosh it's good. I just love kale, blanched and sauteed or baked, or whatever. It's so good and chewy.

I got my first winter csa box yesterday- squash, sweet potatoes, normal potatoes, kale, spinach, radish, beets, celeriac, turnips, leeks, lettuce, brussel sprouts (good braised wiht bacon and mustard seed but that's about it for me and brussels), onions, carrots, and my garden still has eggplants!

Hey tab, the green tomato jam is just bad. Yich. I don't like green tomatoes. what a bummer- a real waste of 5 c of sugar and an orange and apple. Oh well! I'm actually still gonna try the carrot cake jam.

stale

For breakfast I had a bowl of stale old coco puffs mixed with stale old cookie crisp

Mushroom Seitan Currry

Yep - last week was busy - I'm glad it's done. I decided to make apple hand pies this weekend. *I break into this posting for an aside. I almost didn't create this blog because I didn't want you guys to know how much I get obsessed on a particular food. I tend to make something over and over for a couple of weeks or months and then move on. You may have noticed the hand pie theme....

Anyway I basically made an applesauce with Prairie Spy, Northern Spy, Anise Hyssop, a little sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and star anise. I thought that by putting it in a hand pie it would be like a normal pie - Not so. I just don't like applesauce. Give me pie, crisp, cider, or raw apples - no applesauce, not even in a hand pie.

Tonight I made an "interesting" yummy quick curry. Sauteed some shallots and ginger in butter; add mushrooms, seitan and sweet curry powder saute further; add goat yogurt, a little home canned tomatoes, a little pumpkin ale, and a little water - simmer till good and serve over rice.

shake n' bake vs. slop n' glop

I was over at Allisons for dinner. She was going make chicken fingers - basically strips of chicken coated in bisquick. So I wasn't watching as she mixed up the egg and added the bisquick - butter- spices. So she goes to coat the chicken but all it is is a big bunch of glob. So I read the directions. She was suposed to cover with the egg and then the dry ingredients would stick. Suprisingly it tasted fine. But it sure looked gross as we tried to glob muck on the chicken.

Chutney n such

Hey ya. So I guess I haven't really eaten anything interesting lately. Hence the lack of posts. Well, actually I have eaten interesting things, but I had friends over and it seemed weird to wave my laptop in front of the food before we eat. Maybe I'll get used to it...

So this here is my leftover roast chicken from Wed (I roasted one of Kristen's enormous birds with herb butter under the skin, served with root veggies, spinach salad and apple crisp)in a sandwich. I've been getting into the chutney thing lately so this is with a rhubarb curry chutney I made last spring. It keeps forever in the fridge. My late lunch doesn't look very good, but it tasted good.

I've got two recipes planned for this weekend: green tomato, mint and apple chutney and carrot cake jam! Carrots, currants, sugar, apples, cinnamon, walnuts... MMmmmm!

pumpkin seeds

Matt and I had fun with pumpkins on Saturday, We carved them and roasted/toasted the seeds. It was a nice day to sit in the grass. They are not handling the warm temps real well, drying out and getting funny looking, but perhaps that makes them more halloweeney.
I had my first okra cooking experience last week. (ominous dun dun dunnnns) but it was pretty good. They came in our CSA so I figured I should cook them up right away, otherwise I probably would have "forgot" about them. I roasted them in the oven with radishes and zucchini, and ate them with cheesy herbed polenta. I'm sporting a nasty burn on my wrist from the polenta, but it turned out tasty.