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!

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Pumpkin and Sausage Soup

This soup is a universally liked and easy addition to your soup roster. 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, oregano. 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!

PUMPKIN SAUSAGE SOUP
serves 6

(adapted from cavemanfood.blogspot.com)

Ingredients:
1-1.25 lbs bulk breakfast sausage 1/2 a large onion, minced
1 15-oz can of pumpkin
4 cups chicken stock
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried thyme
pinch of dried rosemary
1 tsp paprika
pinch of red pepper flakes
1 tsp sea salt or to taste
2 T butter
1/2 cup coconut milk

Heat the butter in a heavy deep pot and saute the onions until golden, then remove them to a separate bowl. Add the sausage to the pot and brown it until it is cooked through and looks tasty. Remove the sausage from the pot and set aside.

Add the pumpkin to the pot and deglaze with the chicken stock. Add the onions back in and simmer until the pumpkin is soft, about 10 minutes. Puree the soup (a hand blender is easiest, but a regular blender will do). Add in all the remaining ingredients except the coconut milk (don’t forget to add in the cooked sausage!), and simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the coconut milk.

 

 

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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!

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