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!

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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.

Storkbite and I just returned from an extended tour of the Midwest and we are trying to get our groove back.  Lately the goings on in our kitchen have been as easy on the chef as possible.  It was hard traveling alone with the babe, but dealing with an unreliable napper after getting home has been hard on Storkbite Stew and harder on me.  With all this in mind I’ve been making dinners that are both quick and comforting.  This soup reminds me of the time when I was 22, single, living in Chicago in the middle of winter.  I would find myself at the neighborhood bar under the “L” where all I could afford was a pint and a bowl of potato soup.

Basic Potato Soup

So, I recreate it now for my family and all those wonderful memories at the bar with a fireplace when the wind chill was 40 below come rushing back!

It’s easy: Skin a bag of small potatoes or half a bag of large potatoes.  Cube them.  Sautee a little garlic, an onion, and your potatoes in a few tablespoons of olive oil.  Pour in a box of stock (I like Imagine brand - chicken or vegetable), then fill the box of stock up with water and add it.  Make sure all the potatoes are covered.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Let it simmer until the potatoes are cooked through.  Puree in a blender or with a stick blender.  Top with grated cheddar and chives and serve with buttered toast.  That’s it - there is nothing to it.

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:

1. 2 cups flour
2. 2/3 c. frozen lard
3. Pinch of salt
4. 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.

Storkbite’s Papa and I got into an argument one night when we were at the park entertaining Storkbite.  He just couldn’t wait for me to make lentils and churn out some quasi-Indian food.  He stomped his feet all the way home, past all the grocery stores and restaurants that we could have ducked into and gotten prepared food.  I was determined to EAT at home that night and not let all my vegetables go to waste.  I came up with a delicious sausage dish.  On a day that I was more prepared, Storkbite and I found our self hanging out at the butcher sample cured meats, so bought our self my favorite - duck breast!  That was a splurge and well worth the investment because I whacked it in half and saved the other breast in the freezer for another day.

Sausage over Zucchini and Pappardelle

In the case I had a container of my very own homemade basic sauce and nice pappardelle noodles which are big and fat.  I just started up my grill pan and layered on the zucchini and sausage.  Once the noodles were done I put it all together - the layer of defrosted sauce, grilled zucchini strips, and the grilled sausage.  Mozzarella chunks over the top that got nice and melted really topped it off with some delicious richness.  This was completed in as long as it took to boil water and make pasta which translates to as long as it took Papa to give Storkbite a bath.  Once she was all cleaned up she sat at the table and enjoyed heaping spoonfuls to Mama’s basic sauce.

Duck, Duck, Goose

Wow, duck is my favorite and it’s so easy!  You get the breast and slice the fat side so it lays flat when you are searing it and give it a sprinkle of salt and pepper.  Simply put it in a really hot cast iron pan on the stove top. I like my Le Creuset red fryer.  Put it on the pan and leave it alone.  After it’s good and ready, flip it over.  Don’t over cook it because it’s good when it’s still bleeding.

On the side were some green beans almandine and buttered noodles.  Very simple and delicious - just saute your green beans with almonds, olive oil, salt and pepper.  With a nice glass of wine it was a great dinner.  Unfortunately I sent Papa out for the wine last minute and he brought back a very unsatisfactory bottle.  I guess I will have to remember to get totally prepared the next time.

Some nights are healthier than others at Storkbite’s house.  Papa has been working hard lately, so I decided to reward him with the best fried chicken I could make.  Because he loves it so much he even got involved in the production process so everybody won.  Polenta night means that our coffers are empty, I’m out of ideas and there isn’t any time for preparation.  Here is what we came up with.

Fried Chicken and Biscuits

Even though fried food is totally unhealthy, I did my best to select free-range anti-biotic free bird for the project.  It all got washed, dried, dredged in flour, then in buttermilk, then in panko bread crumbs souped up with Old Bay and salt.  Into the hot hot hot oil the little birds went.  We ended up with best fried chicken I’ve ever made.

The biscuit recipe came from the Joy of Cooking with two amendments: instead of shortening I use LARD (you know it, manteca, ummmm), and instead of milk I used buttermilk.   Lard is one of those guilty pleasures, it really does make a pie crust and a biscuit more crumbly, and if you don’t eat it every day you might live until your 65.  I’m willing to take the risk and I’m going to feed it to my baby too.   You will be pleased to know that the thought crossed our mind to fry the chicken in lard, but we did exercise some self-restraint.  I served roasted potato chips on the side.

Polenta, Chard and Yellow Tomatoes

Sometimes I run out of ideas and processing all the vegetables the CSA is bringing on becomes and arduous task.  In this case I baked up some polenta rounds and sauteed chard and yellow tomatoes in olive oil and garlic.  Once the vegetables were tender enough to consume, I layered it on top of the polenta rounds.  With a little cubed fresh mozzarella and a dusting of parmesan cheese it turned out to be an excellent and quick dinner and lunch the day after.  For not having a plan it turned out to be a very rewarding and visually appealing treat.

It’s a bumper crop for zucchini this year - at least from our CSA.   I’m almost running out of ideas on how to process it.  Storkbite is consuming her fair share, it was her first “real” food after all.  I’m not sick of it yet, but it’s getting real hard to be creative.  There has been an overload of eggplant as well.  I’m doing better with it than last year, the last one is going into a baba ganouge today.  I don’t think we will see the end of it though now tomatos are abundant.  My new breakfast is toast, grilled tomato and a friend egg.  Here are a few highlights from the past few days:

Eggplant Rollatini

This was a really easy dish that was prepped over the course of a few days.  One thing I’m learning is take time to prep when you can get it. Storkbite doesn’t allow me time to actually enjoy what I’m doing in the kitchen now that she slithers.  On the day I got seven eggplants, I sliced them all the long way and grilled them with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper.  When they cooled, I neatly piled them into a plastic container and stashed them in the refrigerator.  A few days later (not sure how many) I pulled out my eggplant and made the rollatini.

Simply use a small container of ricotta cheese, mix in an egg, salt, pepper and chopped parsly. Combine it in a mixing bowl and set aside.  Add a ladle full of some sauce (in this case my very own Basic Sauce) to the bottom of your olive oiled baking dish and begin to roll your eggplant.  It doesn’t have to be pretty and sometimes it’s easier to put two eggplant peices together laid flat.  Add a dollop of cheese and roll.  Once you have all your rollatini in the dish, cover it them with sauce and shredded mozzarella cheese. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes until the cheese is golden brown.  This was a Papa pleaser - he loves cheesy baked goodness and it’s a great way to use up your eggplants.

Salmon Loaf

I have no idea what to call this except “Salmon Loaf” which sounds horrible because it was so delicious!  I realized that I had nice grilled salmon left over from the onigiri which was just sitting in the refrigerator calling my name.  Storkbite’s Papa was so taken with this that he wants it worked into our regular menu.  It was very easy so that is fine with me.  The filling consists of chopped grilled salmon, chopped scallions, chives, black sesame seeds and a dash of sesame oil to combine it.  Then I wrapped the filling in sheets of puffed pastry dough available in the freezer section of any super market.  Once it was nicely rolled up I put slits on the top to let the steam out, brushed them with a little oil and sprinkled with black sesame seeds.  I baked these at 425 (as indicated on the dough package) for 30 minutes until golden brown and puffy.  I served by slicing these through the pre-sliced slits which helps to keep the pretty puff pastry in tact.  With a simple salad these were a huge hit, and made great room-temp leftovers for lunch.

Mini Burgers

One of my favorite things is a mini burger. It satisfies my itch for a burger and doesn’t weigh me down after eating 1 lb. of beef.  I like to buy mini dinner rolls at the bakery and make them at home.  In this case I used ground turkey, doctered it up with an egg, salt, pepper, chopped scallions and diced green peppers which I combined in a mixing bowl.  I grilled zucchini chips for toppings and cut up tomatos.  Once I formed my mini burgers into balls, I grilled them on my trusty grill pan.

These got assembled on a toasted bun with olive oil mayo, grilled zuccs, cheddar cheese and fresh tomatos.  They knocked my socks off and were probably on the healthier side of things too.

The CSA vegetables this summer are getting really darn fresh.  We have gotten the best watermelon - way better than the kind you get down at the Key Food.  Storkbite’s Papa doesn’t like his watermelon with anything on it, so I made this salad for my lady friends.   The summer chowder is one of those basic soups that has everything but the kitchen sink - an old summer standby.

Watermelon Salad with Feta

The key to this dish is to cut the watermelon as nicely as possible.  I sprinkled crumbled feta, basil and olives over it then drizzled on balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  A sprinkle of salt and pepper and that’s it.  The sweeter and juicier the watermelon - the better.  It’s a classic summer treat.

Summer Chowder

This starts with a box of chicken or vegetable stock (I like Imagine brand), the equivalent in water, then a bunch of chopped vegetables.  In this case I sauteed onion, celery, zucchini in a little olive oil, salt and pepper.  When the onions were glassy I added carrots and corn cut off the cob.  I added the stock and water, more salt and pepper, and just let it simmer away until the vegetables were tender.  Maybe about 20 - 30 minutes.  Once I was ready to serve, I added heavy cream until the soup turned pale yellow and fresh cut basil.

We ate this hot and cold for days and days.  It’s always nice to have soup in the refrigerator for lunches, especially now with Storkbite when mama’s lunch can be a daunting prospect.

I wanted to introduce Storkbite to rice so I thought it would be interesting to make onigiri and see what happend.  Well… we had rice all over the apartment, in Storkbite’s ears, on the wall, and in between her toes.  It was delicious for Papa and me to eat these delicious onigiri and it’s not our usual fare.

Onigiri

I watched at least three YouTube videos before trying this at home.  I hardly ever try something new, but this was a real hit and a great snack food.  First I grilled salmon in sesame oil, cut nori into strips and cut up avocado for my rice ball filling. Then I steamed sushi rice according to the directions on the bag.  Once it was slightly cooled I started forming my rice balls. The trick is to have a bowl of salt water to cool your hands and to prevent the rice from sticking to your hands when forming the balls.

Form the balls like a snowball. Then make a depression in the center with your thumb, fill it with a piece of avocado and chunk of salmon.  Cover the filling with more rice and continue packing the snowball.  Roll the ball in nori and sprinkle with seasame seeds.  It takes time, but is repetitive and easy.  This is an ideal after school snack!

Once complete you can give it to a baby — if you want rice in ears, on walls, on tables, chairs, floors, moms, dads, etc, etc.