Butternut Squash and Chipotle Salad

I  enjoy eating salad, but being the sort of person that really likes flavor to knock you off your chair, a regular salad with bottled dressing and tomatoes doesn’t interest me remotely. Which is a pity for our health, being that raw veggies are so good for you! We have a revamped pro-salad initiative in our house, as a predicable recovery plan from the overindulgance of the holidays. So I am trying to come up with interesting, flavorful, hearty salads as a main course. This has so far been my favorite. It is highly adaptable, so I’ll just describe what I throw into it, and you can tinker with your own preferred combination!

- Washed, chopped romaine lettuce

- Roasted butternut squash (I buy the pre-diced package at Trader Joe’s, a bit pricey but totally worth it for time-saved. Toss in olive oil, sprinkle with cumin, chili powder, ground oregano, paprika, salt and pepper. Roast at 400 for about 20 min or til edges are brown and crispy.)

- Black beans (rinsed from can)

- Toasted pepitas (the large flat pumpkin seeds)

- Small-diced feta cheese

- Dressing (2 parts olive oil, 1 part vinegar – I like champagne vinegar – with 1 diced chipotle pepper and some extra adobo sauce, cumin, chili powder, ground oregano, paprika, salt and pepper.)

Bon Appetit!

Pumpkin and Sausage Soup

I found this recipe for Pumpkin and Sausage Soup from a friend who posted it on Facebook (thanks Rachel!). I will try almost any soup, and since I love butternut squash soups, I was pretty certain this would be tasty. It was very easy and very good! I added some of my own spices – sage, cumin, paprika. I didn’t think it needed the full 2 pounds of sausage – I pulled some out for another use (maybe 1/2 a pound?) and it still seemed like plenty. I added toasted coconut and green onion for garnish. My sister was present for the taste-testing and confirmed it was a keeper! Perfect especially for warming up during this frigid weather we’ve been having…

Bon Appetit!

New year, better blogging?

The new year seems to be as good a time as any to revive this blog. Our summer of ‘where will we plan to move this week?’ is past us, as is the moving itself and settling in, as are the holidays and a wedding. We are enjoying a quiet January, and Molly and I are feeling nicely settled into our stay-at-home routine, which happily involves more time for cooking for me. It doesn’t include much computer time – at ALL – as our computer is in our bedroom which it turns out has many dangerous, toxic and troublesome things for a toddler to get into. I can read about one sentence on email before the inevitable ‘Molly! No touch!’ interrupts my chain of thought.

While I am aiming to be better on the frequency of reporting new, good recipes, I can’t promise the entries will be long or detailed. I am gradually accepting that this stage of my life is one that doesn’t provide a lot of time for constructing helpful, descriptive, beautiful prose. But there is something almost nice about that – being too busy experiencing life in all it’s joys and messes, seeing everything anew from a toddler’s eyes, to sit down and write about it! That’s not such a bad excuse, after all.

I hope to write more about my favorite soups, some of which I haven’t included here yet, or new ones I’ve found. We cook a LOT of soup in the winter. I am also trying to make more salad for dinner, and have a few new ‘recipes’ I’ve come up with that I’ll try to get typed up. And every now and then if there’s some genius idea for getting good food into my picky eater (more because she’s too busy to eat than because she’s got preferences or aversions), I’ll share that too.

If anyone is still out there reading…it is nice to be back. Hoping to hear from you!

Spicy Glazed Pecans

This wonderful recipe comes from my mother-in-law, who makes them for the holidays. I generally position myself nearest the bowl and eat them continuously through Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I’m not the only one…these go really, really fast! I finally tried making them myself for the graduation party we recently threw for my {smarty-pants, dual-degree, UNC grad} hubby, and though I was nervous about burning them, they turned out to be pretty foolproof and as delicious as usual.

The nuts have a bit of those Christmas-y spices to them, so they are a great winter appetizer, though they are also Southern enough that they can find a home on a picnic table. We had these along with ham biscuits, pepper jelly and cream cheese on crackers, pimento cheese, deviled eggs and red velvet cupcakes for our spread. As usual, they were a big hit and went quickly. I had to buy a jar of mace, which is not a spice I ever use (and I use a lot of spices!). These pecans are so absolutely perfect, I didn’t want to chance missing one of the flavors. I am guessing you could do without it – maybe sub in a little nutmeg or ground cloves for more wintery spice – but seriously, they are so good as is, you might as well go buy it!

Spicy Glazed Pecans

1/3 cup sugar

½ stick (4 Tbs) butter

¼ cup orange juice

1 ½ tsp salt

1 ¼ tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

¼ tsp ground mace

1 lb raw pecans

1. Preheat oven to 250. Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil.
2. Cook the sugar, butter, orange juice, salt, cinnamon, cayenne pepper and mace in a saucepan over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Increase the heat to medium and cook for 2 minutes.
3. Stir pecans into the hot mixture and toss until coated. Spread the nuts in a single layer on the prepared pan and smooth them out with a spatula to make sure they all cook evenly.
4. Bake for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes.
5. Transfer nuts to a large sheet of foil or waxed paper; separate and cool completely. Store in an airtight container up to 5 days.

Smoked Mozzarella and Asparagus Pizza

We tried this amazing smoked mozzarella from Chapel Hill Creamery on a pizza before and we loved it. So on our latest trip to the Carrboro Farmer’s Market, I got a craving to try it again. This time we combined the smokey, chewy, flavorful cheese with fresh asparagus, and it was a killer combination.

My pizza is more like a flatbread, and is layered as follows: Trader Joe’s pizza dough, rubbed with olive oil, sprinkled with salt (only a little since this cheese is pretty salty) and pepper, layered with generic mozzarella (specifically Harris Teeter’s 5 Cheese Italian blend), topped with slices of the smoked mozzarella and trimmed asparagus spears.

The directions on the TJ’s dough says to cook the pizza at 375, but some friends of  mine recently made the same pizza dough and baked it at a much higher temp and I thought it was a big improvement – much crispier and fluffier crust. So I’d recommend baking this at 425 for a shorter period of time (ours takes about 12-15 min).

Foster’s Blondies

One of the highlights of living in the Durham/Chapel Hill area is Foster’s Market. I had known about Sara Foster from reading her recipes in Cottage Living (wipe tear for the demise of that awesome magazine) – every time I made something from that recipe that I liked, it was one of her recipes. I was so excited when my husband told me that she actually has a couple cafe’s in North Carolina. The first morning we woke up in North Carolina, we went to Foster’s Market in Chapel Hill so I could gleefully check out her fabulous foods in person. It continues to be a great treat for us to go to Foster’s for breakfast or lunch – it was even our first meal out with our daughter after her two week check up.

I already have her Fresh Every Day cookbook and have really enjoyed it. Then we had the coconut macaroons on a recent visit – and oh my goodness was that cookie AMAZING!!! I had to find out which cookbook the recipe was in so I could make them at home as soon as possible. Happily for me the recipe is in Sara’s first book, The Foster’s Market Cookbook, and even more happily my sister sent it to me for my birthday! Hooray!

I’m getting to the coconut macaroons tomorrow…and will share the recipe and some pics! But the first recipe I made were these UNBELIEVABLE Blondies. We grilled out with friends the other night and I wanted to make a dessert but did not want to go to the grocery store. I had all the ingredients for these in my pantry, and really love good blondies, so I decided to give them a try. Ooooooh am I glad I did! A really good blondie is hard to find, I think – they can taste more like a chocolate chip cookie bar, which is fine, but not that exciting. These were perfect – even though we overcooked them, they were still really chewy and REALLY caramely, exactly how you would want a blondie to taste! There is a ridiculous amount of brown sugar in the recipe – 4 cups!!! – and no white sugar, so I’m sure that’s what gives it such a deep rich nuttiness.

This recipe fills a half-sheet pan (one of the most useful tools in my kitchen, for baking, roasting and all kinds of other uses) so it makes a huge amount, but I popped the unused half in the freezer and am sure they’ll be just as delicious the second time around.

Another Salmon Salad

We’ve got lots of yummy salmon in our freezer from a Costco trip and I was looking for another easy and healthy recipe for them. I’ve been meaning to try this Salmon Salad recipe from Barefoot Contessa and it was wonderful! There is the perfect amount of sweet and tangy, and crunchy and soft. Instead of grilling, which stinks up our apartment for days with the fishy smell, I baked the salmon at 350 for about 20 minutes. I did not have raspberry vinegar on hand so I used red wine vinegar with a dash of pomegranate molasses (imported by my sister who lives in Dubai) which is an extremely awesome ingredient…the berry/fruity flavor was really good so I think I would recommend the raspberry vinegar as worth it in this recipe if you don’t have the pomegranate molasses (I assume most people don’t!).

I think this recipe may tie Barefoot’s Roasted Shrimp and Orzo salad for favorite summer lunches or light dinners. Both can be made ahead and served either room temp or chilled and they have lots of flavor. The benefit to this one is even fewer ingredients and less time to prep…I hope Michael liked this well enough to eat it more often! I can imagine this being really delicious with some grilled bread or a corn muffin on the side with a fruity dessert and either a nice glass of Rose or a Kir (white wine with a splash of Cassis). Spring is calling!!!

The Perfect {Salmon} Salad

This recipe is one I should have shared YEARS ago and I am truly sorry for holding out on you for so long. The problem is that I don’t have a ‘recipe’ per se – I have a flavor memory from a restaurant in Atlanta, GA where we were in town for a wedding and looking for food while our friends were at the rehearsal dinner. Michael and I were driving through the rain and peering, as best we could, out the windows to find a place for dinner. I don’t even remember the name of the restaurant, but one of us ordered what is easily, no-contest, hands-down the GREATEST salad in the world. I swear.

I don’t know what it is about this flavor combo but every time I make it we both go crazy all over again. It just WORKS. There are a lot of ingredients so you can be flexible if you don’t have all of them, or if you want to throw in something else that seems like it will work (tonight I used some diced dates and they were awesome). But this is the closest I can describe of the original. Whatever shortcuts you have to take to try this, take them – Eat. This. Now!

Perfect Salmon Salad

Makes 2 entrée salads

Assemble from the bottom of each bowl up:

• Salad greens (I like spinach because it’s super healthy and can stand up to this hearty salad, but any kind will work)
• A sweet, mild dressing – this one from Briana’s, which you can find at most grocery stores, is my favorite
• A handful of blanched asparagus spears (I make half a bunch for 2 salads)
• A smattering of some sort of amazing balsamic vinegar-fig-onion compote (this is the hardest part to describe – I usually brown onions in a pan, toss in some balsamic vinegar at the end, and then mix with fig preserves. It becomes a sweet, gooey mess that you spoon over the salad and you’ll want a little taste of it in each bite. Alternatively you might find some kind of ‘compote’ with fig at a specialty foods store that will work. This sounds complicated, but the sweet figgy flavor is an absolutely essential component!)
• 2 portions of salmon filets, cooked and then crumbled, warm, over the salads
• Chopped walnuts
• A generous amount of shaved/sliced manchego cheese (ideally, this melts slightly over the warm salmon. This is the other must-have ingredient – manchego works absolutely perfectly in this salad. You’ll love it.)

Last minute desserts from your pantry

I thought this was a handy idea from Bon Appetit – some suggestions for desserts you can usually make on no notice with ingredients you already have in your pantry.  My husband is a big fan of PB and Jelly Bars – though I use Barefoot Contessa’s recipe and can’t comment on this one, though they look very similar.

Another pantry dessert staple I love are Nigella Lawson’s Choco Hoto Pots.  These are as easy as can possibly be and use basic ingredients you’ll have around.  You do need a bit of chocolate, but often I will have a bar or just plain chocolate chips lying around, which are fine in this.  This is basically a version of chocolate lava dessert – gooey in the inside, cakey on the outside.  You make them in individual ramekins and they turn out to be quite impressive though they take no more than 5 or 10 min to throw together.  You can prepare them in advance of a dinner party and then pop them in the oven once you’ve finished eating and soon the house will smell delicious and this very glamorous but low effort dessert will wow your guests!  Serve with fresh whipped cream to put it over the top.

Pumpkin Oatmeal

This amazing oatmeal recipe is my new favorite, hands down.  It is the definition of comfort food – perfect for cold weather breakfasts or, frankly, dessert!  I’ve made it three times in a month and everyone who’s tried it has loved it.  The recipe comes from Aarti Sequiera, who is the most recent Next Food Network Star.  I was rooting for her during the competition – everything she made looked totally delectable, with such interesting flavor and spice combinations.  I’ve really enjoyed her show, though I haven’t made many of her dishes yet.  But when I saw her make this, I went right to the computer to print off the recipe. And though it was only 3 days since the episode had first aired, there were already 10 reviews of the recipe and they were all glowing!  So I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought this would hit the spot during cold winter weather.

The oatmeal itself is actually nice and healthy, with no added sugar, and lots of fiber and vitamins in the can of pumpkin added.  But…I then add walnuts, brown sugar and cream.  When I felt guilty about all the calories I held the cream, and it was still pretty good.  But with all the yummy stuff it is HEAVENLY and works equally well as a cozy dessert.  If you’re a maple syrup person, that would be great on this as well. The recipe makes a lot of oatmeal, which is fine because you can stick the whole pot in the fridge and rewarm it the next day with a bit of almond or regular milk.

Pumpkin Oatmeal

from Aarti Sequiera

• 1 (14-ounce) can pumpkin puree (the unseasoned kind)
• 2 cups water
• 2 cups unsweetened almond milk, or water
• 2 tablespoons raisins (golden or regular)
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 3/4 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice OR 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon plus 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom plus 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 2 cups quick cooking oatmeal (not the instant kind)
• 1/4 cup walnuts
• Honey, brown sugar, cream and maple syrup, for serving

In large saucepan over high heat, combine the pumpkin puree, water, milk, raisins, salt, and pumpkin pie spice (alternative spices). Bring to a boil.

Add the oatmeal. Turn the heat down and cook according to your oatmeal instructions; mine usually takes about 15 minutes. Stir often.

Meanwhile, in a small cast iron skillet over medium heat, toast the walnuts until they’re fragrant and a gentle golden brown, about 10 minutes.

Once the oatmeal is cooked (each grain should be tender), serve with the assortment of toppings for people to choose from.