A Thanksgiving Retrospective... Remembering what the season's really about

Please forgive me in advance - I may get a little soap-box-y in this post. 

I got a part time job at Marshalls for the Christmas season. After a few weeks of training where I was in multiple departments, mostly moving displays from one part of the store to another, they settled on having me greet customers as they came into the store. I love it - and I love that the store does it. Many folks that come in aren't expecting to be greeted and appreciate the time we take to say hello, make them feel welcome, help them find things, and assist them in getting their packages to their cars. Some people think I'm a mannequin, or think I'm giving out free stuff, or even think I'm a representative of some other company promoting something, but the majority smile and say hello back to me. But just this week I realized that people are getting cranky. There are more Grinches out there, like the guy taking his mother shopping who says "Well then she doesn't come in" when I tell him that our carts don't go outside for security reasons. (The wheels lock. Cheshire is the last Marshalls in the state that doesn't have carts like this.) She needed a cart to help her walk, which we totally understand. When she doesn't find anything he says, "Don't shop here anymore." Or the woman who says, "These clothes are ugly! The sweaters are ugly! My daughter's wardrobe is 10 times nicer - I'm going to West Farms Mall -" as she's heading out the door. These folks are still the minority, but I'm worried that the closer we get to Christmas, the crankier people will be. 

And that's unfortunate. Yesterday, one woman came in and said, "I'm still in the spirit!" and I knew she meant the Christmas spirit. Thank you, lady! Thank you for appreciating what the spirit actually means! It means being nice and smiling and appreciating what you have and the people you love. I don't think you need to show your love by showering presents on people. ("The avarice never ends!" says Jim Carrey's Grinch. It really never does. I hope it doesn't get worse each year.) 

So for today's post I am looking back at what I cooked on Thanksgiving to remind myself and my readers (whom I love - thank you!) that the winter holiday season is about giving thanks. Presents are just the icing on the cake. What matters to me is having my family around, having a home to stay warm in, and having friends to exchange holiday greetings with. Oh yeah - and lots of delicious food, of course. 

In addition to way too many pies and the usual salad (Julia Child's Caesar), I made a bacon cranberry orange chutney. It tasted just as good as it sounds. The recipe came from Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

Mmmm bacon. 

The chutney paired very well with the turkey. Our plate this Thanksgiving was a true picture of bounty: hunks of turkey, mashed potatoes pooled with gravy, cornbread stuffing, brussel sprouts, and salad. My mouth waters just thinking about it. 

I made another pumpkin pie (and still have bags of frozen pumpkin in the freezer). This one was from Faith Middleton's Food Schmooze and had a walnut brown sugar topping. 

I used a pre-made Pillsbury crust.

There was so much dessert but we stuffed ourselves, as tradition demands. My aunt made a triple chocolate cheesecake that was one of her best. She loves making cheesecakes, so much so that one year we got her the Philadelphia Cream Cheese book of like 50 cheesecake recipes. She loves trying new ones. This year's was definitely a win.

This holiday season, please try to remember what it's really about. The season is about celebrating what brings light to our lives: friends, family, and literal daylight. Things are great if you have the means, but money can't buy love. Treasure the people in your life. Share experiences instead of things. Don't let Christmas trample all the other holidays - embrace and acknowledge other traditions and everyone will be happier. 

To my readers: I am so thankful for you. Thank you for going on this journey with me. You keep me disciplined to write and I am so grateful for that. 

Be delicious this season! 

Happy munching! 

Giving Thanks for Pie

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone had a great holiday with lots of amazing food, good people, and some snow depending on where you are. We had some lovely flurries on Thanksgiving and a ground-covering snow the day before. The weekend before I went to a Friendsgiving party, the first I'd ever been to. It's a really fun idea: a gathering where you can be with friends and girlfriends/boyfriends - and have twice the turkey. For the occasion I made individual pumpkin pies. There was so much food that they didn't get eaten at dinner, but I was able to send them home with folks and with my mom when she went into work. 

Thanks to AllRecipes.com for the recipe! 

It calls for vanilla wafers but many people who commented recommended gingersnap cookies instead. The vanilla wafers got too soggy. I thought the graham crackers would be yummier than vanilla wafers and I was right!   

I used dark corn syrup instead of Karo Lite like the recipe suggested and it turned out just fine.

It took a lot longer than 25 minutes for the pies to set. It was probably closer to an hour. I kept putting it back in for 10-minute intervals.

The little pies were beautiful. Oddly though, the recipe was only supposed to make 18 - I had enough filling left over to make a whole pie! 

Instead of using the pre-made crust I had in the freezer, I used a bunch of the leftover ginger snaps! 

I found a recipe on Food.com and made the crust using gingersnaps, Mexican vanilla, butter, and sugar. I don't think I pressed it quite as much as I should have, but it came out pretty good.

Like with the individual pumpkin pies, no one cut into the pie because there was just too much other delicious food. When we were all playing games and the party was winding down, we had some tiny slices and it was good.

I still have so much pumpkin in my freezer... what to do, what to do?

Happy holidays to you and yours! (And happy munching!)

Bread Crumbs, Pumpkin Soup and Carrot Salad

I've had a loaf of bread in the freezer for awhile and realized after a bit that it wasn't toasting very well. The piece of toast would fall apart and make a ridiculous mess in the toaster. The first recipe I was looking into to make my Cinderella pumpkin into pumpkin soup called for bread crumbs so I decided to make those. They came out really well and very tasty, no salt necessary. 

All I did was process the bread and bake the crumbs in the oven at 350. Ta da! 

The first pumpkin soup-in-a-pumpkin recipe called for dry white wine, so I found another recipe by Alton Brown. Turns out my pumpkin was a little small and the soup was heavy on onion and garlic, but I liked it.

The pumpkin, I think, is a Cinderella. It's a beautiful pink color with lovely orange flesh. 

When I added the apple, chicken soup, onions, and milk, the pumpkin was about to overflow. But the real problems didn't start until I put stuff in the oven.

It looks nice, right?

My mom's oven, though, is rather temperamental. You set it to 250 and it jumps up to 350. But if you want it to go above 350, you set it to 300 and it doesn't heat any higher! So I had the pumpkin in for almost 2 hours and when I pulled it out, the soup was hot but the pumpkin flesh was not cooked.

But look at how pretty it is with Swiss cheese and sage!

By the time I got it out of the oven, Mom and I had to chow down before going to chorus. She didn't like it because it had too much onion and garlic, but I liked it okay. I even ate the leftovers for lunch the next day. 

Because I needed more than just that soup, I made my mom's carrot salad. I remember it being sweet with a vinegar bite. I found a recipe with mayonnaise, sugar and raisins. I added apple cider vinegar to the last bits of mayo in our fridge and shook it up with some sugar. It tasted exactly like what I was looking for. I can't remember where I got the basic recipe but if you Google "carrot salad" you're sure to find something.

So. Much. Pumpkin.

Recently I read an article about boycotting Christmas, and even though I do like the holiday, I like it in its place - after Thanksgiving, WAY after Halloween, and ending before New Years. The prospect of the Christmas-consumer season extending into January scares me. (Yes, I know about January 6 and Three Kings Day, but that should be it. Gift receipts accepted until the end of January? Really? If you didn't like it Christmas morning, just get rid of it. )  

But I digress. My point is that in the article there is an urge for folks to keep their Halloween pumpkins on their front stoops late into November as a way to hold onto fall. So I still have a whole 35 pound pumpkin on my front porch. Eventually I'll carve it and maybe roast it, but not until after I've used up all the other pumpkin I've already roasted. (Cue maniacal laughter. I'll have pumpkin puree for MONTHS.) 

After the jack-o-lanterns began sinking into themselves, I cut them up and roasted them. For days. Literally. I had the oven on all day, just roasting pumpkin pieces in batches. 

But they made the house smell lovely and tasted amazing, especially the yummy sweet juice that leaked onto the aluminum foil. Canned pumpkin simply can't compete. 

Then I cut off the skin, picked up a potato masher and went to town.

Some of the puree went into the freezer, some went into the fridge. I experimented with adding raw pumpkin cubes to NutriBullet smoothies, but stopped when I realized that my gut could not handle it. Now I'm not even sure if I can really eat pumpkin, which is highly unfortunate considering how much I have. I seem to handle the pumpkin pancakes okay, so maybe I'll be all right in small doses.

Pumpkin nutmeg smoothies were so good in theory! 

What pumpkin dishes will you be serving up this Thanksgiving? 

Spanish Rice, aka What to do with Leftover Rice

Once again I've been a very bad blogger. It's been almost three weeks since my last blog and I've been cooking since then; just haven't made myself sit down and write. But today I've got pumpkins roasting in the oven and lots of time to stay home and play catch-up. 

During my second to last day at Farmer Joe's (waah), we had Chinese food for lunch. Aaron wanted the leftover Chinese but not the rice because she doesn't like rice, so I took it home. I thus had three cartons of rice, one brown and two white. With no idea what to cook for dinner, I asked Mom for some advice. She said that her mom, my grandma Bee, used to make huge quantities of rice and throw in bacon, canned tomatoes, and whatever else she had in the fridge to feed her husband and five kids. Rice, like oatmeal, is stick-to-the-ribs food and relatively cheap, so it's great for big families. Because this dish is my grandma's, and an iteration of canned tomatoes and rice was a staple of my mom's when she lived alone, this post may be the closest I've come to the purpose of this blog in awhile. 

All you have to do is heat the rice in a skillet while making the bacon. I decided to use one of those microwaved bacon doohickeys (that's how that's spelled - I learned something today!), but you could also make the bacon in the oven. 

Add a can of diced or chopped or stewed (or fresh chopped) tomatoes and stir. You may need to add extra liquid but we didn't and it was fine.

Then break the bacon into little bits and mix in with the rice.

It's a simple, pretty dish with a lot of flavor. You shouldn't need extra salt and you can add pepper or garlic or basil; whatever floats your boat. The dish also lasts well in the fridge if you don't eat it all at once.

You can also make it with fresh rice, but I think that defeats the purpose a little bit. Part of the main idea is to use up what you've got.

What would you put in this dish?

Happy munching!

Waffle Fries? Nah, I'm good.

I would much rather have real, made-by-me fries any day.

I'd been looking for a recipe for the butternut squash in my foyer for awhile now. I can't quite remember how long it's been chillin' there. Thanks to my AllRecipes.com daily email, I found something quite intriguing - butternut squash fries.

Who'd have thought? I mean, we all love our sweet potato fries. Why not cut a butternut squash in similar configurations and bake them like sweet potatoes? Of course, it works - perhaps even better than the original - and tastes ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.

Although waffle fries will be easily available when Chick-Fil-A opens next month, I won't be partaking. I will never step foot in that store, give them any of my money, or eat any of their food. So although it isn't a waffle fries (waffle fry?) recipe, I'm still glad I have it in my back pocket.

I really love AllRecipes.com for the comments that people can leave. So many times I have read through the comments and learned substitutions, tips, and shortcuts to make the recipe more versatile, less complicated, and quicker. In the comments for this recipe, someone said to peel the squash with a knife instead of a peeler. So I did that.

I cut the squash into two pieces: the bottom and the top tube. I cut a slice off the bottom and the top to make the pieces stand up (mostly) straight.

Then I used a big knife to slice down the sides, carefully removing strips and chunks of the peel.

Then I cut the pieces in half and scooped out the seeds.

Then I cut those pieces into wedges. Some of the wedges were thinner than others and some were shaped kind of weird, but those just crisped up during baking. They reminded me of those delectable little end-fries that you find at the bottom of the bag. (Bag fries. It's a thing.)

The recipe said to bake the fries for 20 minutes, but I baked mine for about 50: 10 minutes, then flip. 15 minutes, then flip again. Another 15, another flip. A final 10 minutes and they were done just as my mom walked in the door.

I plated them all on their own because I didn't know what else to make for dinner. We pigged out on them with Farmer Joe's Homestyle Ketchup. They were luscious and I was very sad when the plate was clean, though I let my mom have the last one because I love her.

Get outta here, waffle fries. You're way out of your league.

What other fall vegetables could you make fries out of? (Turnips? Beets?)

Happy munching!

When Are These Going to - LID NOW, OH GEEZ

A perk of working at a farm stand is getting the inside track on a lot of things that we take for granted. One of those things is popcorn. It comes in bags from a grocery store; you put the bags in microwave ovens and in about three minutes you have a snack. It sounds pretty simple and awesome - but now we're starting to have a problem with bagged popcorn because its loaded with chemicals, grown from GMOs, and provides way more salt and fat than you ever need in a "snack." There is also some concern about eating too much microwaved food; those microwaves can affect what you're putting into your mouth, plus your body if you stand too close. So what's the solution? Make-it-yourself stove popcorn is making a comeback. 

Farmer Joe explained to a customer what he does to make the popping corn and it sounds pretty simple. If I had fields and fields of corn, I'd probably do it too. All you need to do is lay the corn cobs out flat, preferably in the sun, for a few days until they dry completely. Then you unwrap the dried leaves and remove the silk, Indian-burn the cob (anyone who went to elementary school knows what I'm talking about), and pop the kernels in an air popper or over the stove.

One corncob produced a little less than a half cup of kernels. 

I adapted Alton Brown's recipe for stove top popcorn because I had peanut oil in the pantry. I used a medium-sized pot and about three tablespoons of oil. Look at how pretty the kernels are!

Stove-top popcorn is an exercise in patience. Once you turn the heat on, you have to slide the pot back and forth over the burner constantly. As you're standing there, you start to inspect each kernel and ask, "Will it be you? Will you pop first? Or that one...?" The other recipe I used as a guide warned to have the lid ready because once the first kernel pops, all of its friends will quickly follow. (Hence the title.) 

I was more than a little anxious during this process. 

Once that first kernel popped, the rest started jumping out of the pot so I slammed on the lid. After a few minutes the popping subsided and I took the pot off the burner. A few stray pops made me jump. When I opened the lid, I saw

Woohoo! A full pot of luscious, fresh, no chemicals added popcorn (except for what's in the peanut oil, of course). I tossed the popcorn in Molly McButter and chowed down.

Although the process takes considerably more effort than microwavable popcorn, the added fun element makes it worth it. Nothing like a little increase in blood pressure to spice up your afternoon!

There are many, many ways to jazz up this popcorn. How do you like to eat popcorn? Sweet? Salty? Savory?

A Wealth of Tomatoes

At the farm stand where I currently work, it seems like just when I thought the tomato season was going to end, four - or five, or six, LOTS of - black crates of new heirlooms and seven or so boxes of field variety appear on the morning truck. They just keep coming! There's nothing in the world that tastes like a fresh tomato, though, so I'm not really complaining. When I interviewed for this job, Mrs. Farmer Joe asked me if I could heft a 50-pound bag of corn. At first I thought she was kidding and, caught off guard, responded, "Uh, maybe a 25-pound bag but I'm not really sure!" At that time I had no idea how much I could actually lift; it's been about two years since I've lifted weights in a gym (or been in a gym at all...) She assured me they'd work me up to it, and before I knew it I was slinging boxes and crates with the best of 'em. (What really scares me are the boxes of potatoes...)

For those tomatoes I found a plethora of fresh tomato recipes. But I live by the rule that you eat what you have before buying new things, whether that's canned or boxed things in the pantry or the vegetables you bought last week. Thus when I offered to make lunch for the team I knew I had to start with what we had in my mom's pantry.

When my mom cooks nowadays, it's usually from a can, cooked in a skillet. It's just her in the house - the cat doesn't like tomatoes - so I can understand. Cooking is WAY more fun when you're doing it for other people. Cooking for us entertains me because it's for us; I love cooking for myself, but it does get a little old having the same thing for lunch the next three days because you just made a family-sized portion of whatever recipe you tried. (I recall a Buzzfeed list of single-person problems which includes, "Craving a brownie? Or 12?") My mother also likes to buy large quantities of one thing when it's on sale, like boxed couscous, any type of prepared artichoke, marmalade, or variously prepared tomatoes. I took stock of our pantry and found at least four cans of stewed, diced, or pureed tomatoes and knew that I had to use those up first.

Thus - to the Internet! Most of my recipes come from AllRecipes.com but the two I used came from Food Network and MyRecipes. The first is a Rachel Ray recipe incorporating pasta, pesto, tomato sauce, and cheese. I gave myself Bonus Points for using an entire jar of pesto from the pantry.

Pesto Pasta Bake with Tomato Sauce
(adapted from Rachel Ray)

This is the tomato sauce for the bake. It's made from stewed tomatoes, onion, garlic, olive oil, and spices. The smell wafting from that pan was miraculous. 

I used spaghetti instead of pasta because that's what I had. I had to take this photo because 

LOOK AT ALL THAT CHEESE

This is what the spaghetti looked like with the pesto and cheese. This is the base of the bake before being smothered in the sauce.

This is how it looked after adding the tomato sauce and mozzarella. It's Liuzzi's mozzarella from Farmer Joe's farm stand; it's really fantastic and you should go buy some. Now.

This made a LOT of food and fed our entire team. Everyone loved it - I was so glad and had such a grand time cooking! 

The second recipe, the tomato bread pudding, is really different. I'd never thought of adding sugar to tomatoes but the resultant taste is quite exquisite. This recipe came from MyRecipes and I call it a Southern-style tomato bread pudding.

It's very simple and doesn't look like much in the photographs. 

It looks like even less because my kitchen's lighting is terrible. 

But don't let the photos fool you - the taste is OUTRAGEOUS. You add brown sugar to the mixture of stewed tomatoes, cubes of stale bread, butter and pepper. Then you bake it all and the sugar caramelizes the tomatoes to make this sweet, chewy thing that is really surprising. Farmer Joe didn't love it as much as the pesto pasta dish, but everyone has their own tastes. 

What do you like to cook with the bounty of summer (and fall, apparently) tomatoes? 

Day Off Cornmeal Pancakes

I recently started a new job working at a farm stand in my hometown. Although I love the work, it's been hard on this body that's gotten soft not having to bike everywhere or carry tons of stuff each week to prep for volunteer projects. I am SORE. Today is my day off so I woke up slow and said to myself, "I want pancakes for breakfast." Unfortunately it's not always easy to make just one serving of pancakes, though I will halve the recipe next time. I read an article from Coffee Meets Bagel about "single people problems," one of which being leftovers. "Craving a brownie? How about twelve?"

I've always loved leftovers, which I'm sure you've noticed if you've been following along. But when I make pancakes I inevitably eat a few while cooking them and then just freeze what's left. So I eat maybe three or four and then save twice that. They taste almost as good when you microwave them, but still - fresh off the griddle is ALWAYS better. 

I was determined to use some more of my Louisiana cornmeal so I made the cakes. I had to take pictures because I have never - NEVER - not burned the first batch. And just look! 

Golden brown, fluffy, perfect! "It NEVER happens!" - Lewis Black

I used gigi's Batter Cakes recipe and made some changes.

I used powdered buttermilk (from the infamous pantry) and thought it was neat, all frothy like that.

The batter was WAY too runny. Perhaps you should only use 1/2 cup of buttermilk instead of a full cup? My envelope of powdered buttermilk made a cup's worth so I used the whole thing, but I had to add 2/3 cup of flour like someone suggested in the comments. 

The directions say to pour on the griddle in "heaping tablespoonfuls." Ain't no way you could make a heaping tablespoonful out of that runny mess above. 

The recipe said it made ten servings but I got a dozen small pancakes out of the batch. So unless the servings are... no, I don't even want to try to solve that. I have no idea what the serving size is supposed to be. One pancake? Oh well. 

Mm... they even taste good out of the microwave... 

What are your favorite pancake ingredients? 

Happy munching!