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Poor little Storkbite has been consuming her fair share of squash lately. We’ve have all kinds: butternut, acorn, pumpkins, etc. The CSA bestowed these gifts upon us and they started to pile up in our kitchen. I decided to roast them all one night (six in total) and made them into various purees. Some puree was saved for Storkbite’s lunches and dinners, others were processed into delightful things for Storkbite’s parents.
Butternut Squash Soup
The crisp fall weather bodes well for soups and Storkbite loves to eat them. In this case I sauteed garlic and 1 small onion in 1 tbs. butter and 1 tbs. olive oil then combined 2 qts. of butternut squash puree with 1 box of vegetable or chicken stock, 1 box of water, salt and pepper. I let it simmer away on the stove and served it with a dollop of yogurt. The leftover soup has become a stay-at-home mom’s best friend for quick, easy and cheap lunches for mother and child alike.
Pumpkin Custard
If you have the craving for pumpkin pie, but don’t want to go through the trouble of making pie crust then this is for you. For those of you that haven’t torn off your Libby’s canned pumpkin label and stashed it in your personal collection of recipes like I have then here is my verison of the knock off which can be used to achieve Pumpkin Custard.
Preheat your oven to 425. Put one brick of graham crackers, 3 tbs. butter and 1/4 c. brown sugar in a food processor and combine. Press it into the bottom of a large rectangular glass baking dish. Bake that for 10 mins. in your preheating oven.
Assemble the custard part similar to the recipe on the Libby’s label, but slightly different as indicated here:
Ingredients:
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
- 2 large eggs
- 1 qt. homemade roasted pumpkin puree, or 1 can Libby’s Pumpkin
- 1 can (12 fl. oz.) Evaporated Milk
- 1 8 oz. package of softened cream cheese
Mix up your eggs, sugar, add the evaporated milk, pumpkin, cream cheese and spices to your mixer bowl. Mix it all up and pour over your graham cracker crust.
Bake for 45 minutes until the custard holds almost still when wiggled. Top with whipped cream and ground nutmeg if you so choose.
It’s a lot less trouble that pumpkin pie and yet has all the same flavors!
‘
Stuffed Cabbage
Tis the season for a whole lot of cabbage. I think that I have at least two more heads of cabbage awaiting some sort of similar treatment as you see herewith. Cabbage causes Storkbite to loose her cookies so we can’t feed her too much even though she loves all cabbage, especially the fermented variety. In this tasty dish I conjured my German roots and rolled up some nice augmented pork sausage in blanched cabbage leaves. Follow along if this sounds good to you. It was a homerun at our house.
First blanch a head of cabbage by cutting out the core from the stem side and dunking it in a pot of boiling water. With each dunk a few leaves will fall off. Put the leaves in a colander and rinse them with cold water.
Assemble your filling in a seperate mixing bowl. I used browned pork sausage (like Italian sausage, just slit the casing and squeeze contents into a bowl) combinded with 2 tbs. bread crumbs, diced onion, garlic and bell peppers. Add a few pinches of salt and pepper and mix it all up.
Take the cabbage leaves one by one, add about 1/4 c. of filling to each leaf and roll up and place in your pan. Cover it all in a nice tomato sauce (like Basic Sauce from my previous post) and bake in a covered Dutch oven for about 40 mins.
It was extremly satisfying, dairy free and consumed with reckless abandon by the entire family — including Storkbite.
Sometimes we can’t get enough of a good thing, or our CSA keeps sending us the same stuff. When that happens we do a lot of repeats with slight variations. This time I added leeks to the basic potato soup and transformed it into what Storkbite’s Papa refers to as “Baked Potato Soup”. In effort to be as thrify and possible and handcraft my own stork food, these pureed soups are becoming a real hit. Just before adding the cream, I skim off a good portion and Storkbite eats it for her lunches and dinners. So far the potato soup, butternut squash soup and now potato and leek soup have been a huge hit with the babe.
Potato and Leek Soup, a.k.a. Baked Potato Soup
For this soup I sauteed one small onion, three cloves garlic, and two chopped leeks (remember to soak in cold water to remove the sand!) in some olive oil and 1 tbs. butter. Once everything was glassy and smelled good I added about two pounds of skinned and diced fingerling potatoes. After turning it with a large wooded spoon so it was nicely mixed I added 1 box of chicken stock, refilling the same box with water and adding it. Then some salt and pepper to taste. When the potatoes have cooked down I used the handy stick blender and turned it into a puree. I then skimmed Storkbite’s portion and added at least 1/2 c. heavy cream to the pot an stirred it in.
To build the baked potato style presentation, simply add croutons*, grated cheddar cheese and coarse chopped cooked bacon. It really makes it a meal and is greatly satisfying on a fall night.
*Croutons - another thrifty tip. Don’t throw away your stale bread, instead cube it and put it in a freezer bag. When you need a handful of croutons for soup or salad, simply pull out your frozen cubes and coat with olive oil, salt and pepper. Put them in the toaster oven or under the broiler for a few minutes and you will have perfect homemade croutons. They are so delicious that you won’t know then were previously frozen.
These crisp fall like days are calling for comfort food and autumnal dishes. Now that Storkbite is staying up later and later, it’s hard to muster the energy to be creative and well fed. I decided to “take the day off” yesterday and stay home to knit and make apple pie. Storkbite’s Grandma came last month with a load of apples from the organic farm in Indiana and I still had apples in cold storage that needed to be processed. Is it a Midwestern thing to melt cheddar cheese over a slice of warm apple pie? If you haven’t tried it, you should do so.
Goat Cheese Lasagna
I was uncertain how this would turn out; however, I must say that I knocked it out of the park. Not only was it easy and created in shifts, it was comforting on a chilly evening.
I used Barilla flat lasagna noodles. Layered lasagna noodles with bechamel (1/4 cup butter melted with 1/4 cup flour, add 2 1/4 cups milk and bring to a boil, simmer until thickened), cooked ground turkey, sauteed yellow and red peppers and goat cheese. There was no particular order to the layering, it was kind of a mess actually. Once the dish was full, I added the remaining bechamel and some shredded parmesan cheese. I baked it for about 20 minutes until golden brown at 375. It was so warm, melted and delicious. I’m having left-overs for lunch now!
Apple Pie
Lattice top apple pie is a fall treat. This one got souped up with dried bing cherries, golden raisins and pecans. Simply make a pie crust (look below if you actually want to do that!) and then add your mixture of cored quartered apples, raisins, cherries and nuts together with 2 tbs. of flour, 1 tsp of cinnamon and the juice of 1 lemon. Turn it all together and fill your pie shell. Weave a pretty lattice, paint it with butter, dust it with sugar and bake it for about an hour at 350 until golden brown.
Serve to husband / boyfriend / partner in the evening a la mode for unexpected results.
Pie Dough
This is the secret family recipe:
- 2 cups flour
- 2/3 c. frozen lard
- Pinch of salt
- 6 - 10 tbs of ice water
Combine flour and lard in a large bowl with forks or a pastry cutter until it forms pea size bits. Add salt. Add ice water a bit at a time and combine until it forms a ball. This takes time and you must be careful not to over do it or it becomes tough. Be gentle and go slow. Lots of love makes a better pie crust. Don’t even try to substitute butter or shortening. It’s not the family recipe if you don’t use lard.
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