Cookies & Cocktails Plus Catching Up

It's been awhile again. I haven't been in much of a writing mood lately I guess. It's an overwhelming time of year - work is busy wrapping up for our holiday shutdown, busy trying to think of presents for everyone (and realizing Christmas is in less than two weeks!!), busy cooking, and busy spending time with friends. Those aren't bad things it's just sometimes it all gets piled on at once and stresses me out a little.

But enough of that - there are a few exciting recipes I have been wanting to share from the past few weeks! The first is for this salad - it pretty much has everything that is great in it: kale, pineapple, avocado, black beans, and peanuts. You can find the recipe here. I more or less just followed it.

I made the salad to go along with a West African Peanut Stew. My coworker sent me the recipe for this one and I'm not sure where they got it from, so I will share it with you here!

West African Peanut Stew
2 c. onion, chopped
1 T. vegetable oil
1/2 t. cayenne pepper
1 t. powdered ginger
1 c. carrots, chopped
2 c. winter squash or sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 inch chunks
5 c. vegetable stock
3/4 c. smooth peanut butter (I used chunky and omitted the chopped peanuts)
1 T. sugar
1/2 c. diced green onion
1 T. chopped peanuts

Sauté the onions over medium heat for 3 minutes.  Add the cayenne and ginger.  Add the carrots and squash.  Add the stock, cover and simmer about 20 minutes until the vegetables are tender.  Puree with a hand blender if desired - I did only slightly, not until it was anywhere near smooth.  Add the peanut butter and sugar.  Season with salt and pepper.  Stir until blended.  Serve topped with green onions and chopped peanuts.

The next recipe doesn't have a great photo to go along with it - sorry, I was hungry after this pre-P90X workout! More on that later. I had some leftover pumpkin from making cookies that I needed to use up, and I'd been curious about these pumpkin and squash mac and "cheese" recipes I'd been seeing lately. I loosely followed this recipe here, except I cheated a little and added ~1/2 cup of smoked Gouda since I had it leftover. I didn't have any sage (or at least I didn't want to go out in the dark and rain to pick some) so I used some thyme to season it. The sauce was a bit thick so I thinned it a little with some pasta water - I think I could have actually used a little more since it was still pretty thick. I thought this was delicious though - super creamy and flavorful and a bit healthier alternative to regular mac & cheese with all of the comfort.

I've been doing a lot of holiday baking and candy making recently too. Here's a few things I've tried out so far:

Spritz cookies (fun with the cookie press!)

 Homemade Peppermint Patties (first time I attempted tempering my own chocolate - mixed results but better than I feared!)

 Caramel Pecan Bars (I have about a million of these since I used the recipe from the large batch cookbook!)

 This past weekend we had out annual Cookies & Cocktails party - I love entertaining and this party is pretty simple since you're asking people to all contribute a holiday treat. We always have a ton of food and end up with not enough table space to even display everything! It's a nice chance to get all of our friends together to hang out and surprisingly I think almost everyone actually likes the dressing up part - it certainly makes it more festive! Check out how nice everyone looked! I think the guys win this year - they all looked very fancy.

We had a smaller turnout this year - December is a tough time to schedule events! It was great fun though and luckily my coworkers willingly ate every single leftover that I brought in today!

Hope you're all getting ready for the holidays without too much stress - if so, let me know how you're doing it please!

-C

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

I'm not sure how this long weekend flew by so fast! I'm definitely not ready to go back to work tomorrow, but I guess there are only a few more weeks until we're off for Christmas!

We made a quick trip up to Washington to visit my family for Thanksgiving. This was the first year we didn't have it at my grandma's, which I thought might be a little strange, but having it at my cousin's house actually turned out very nice. I guess lied when I said I was for sure going to make something with squash to bring, I ended up bringing a pear and goat cheese salad that my friend Sara gave me the recipe for - very delicious and nice to have something green at Thanksgiving! I also brought some Field Roast for me and my sister and it was really nice to have a savory protein along with all of the creaminess of the potatoes and mac & cheese.

On our way out of town Friday we stopped for lunch at one of my favorite restaurants in town - Hillside Quickie. I hate that I can't eat here all the time - it makes my mouth water just thinking about it. I know a "tofu sandwich" might not sound like the most appealing thing ever, but they have the world's most amazing tofu. It's not at all squishy or bland - it's dense and meaty and smokey. And the best part? I found out that they SELL it there by the pound!! I now have my very own pound of smoked tofu in the fridge. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am about this.

Yesterday we headed out with some of our friends to get our Christmas tree. It was an absolutely perfect day for it - no rain, fairly warm, and even a little bit of sun! We tried a new location this year - Donovan's Place in west Corvallis. I would recommend this place because: 1) They had a tree shaker, far less bugs came into the house this year, and 2) Free hot cocoa! The people working there were also very nice and took photos for us and tied the trees to our cars.

Jonathan cut the tree - I just took photos.

 This tree was a little bit bigger than I had anticipated. In fact, I think it may be the biggest Christmas tree I have ever had.

 Here it is in it's various states - where we found it, inside and hopefully relatively straight, and with the lights added. That's where I had to stop last night because we were headed over to dinner at our friends house and by the time we got back home I was too tired to finish it.

 

We finished the rest of the decorating this morning - can't get the star to stay on straight. Oh well. Pixel seems to approve.

 

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and is getting into the holiday spirit! I know Pixel sure is - it means tons of extra "toys" (aka ornaments) are within a paws reach.

-C

Sunday Dinner: Warm Sweet Potato and Kale Salad (plus my take on Chex Mix!)

We've received quite a few sweet potatoes in our CSA box in the past couple of weeks. I was thrilled because I absolutely love sweet potatoes, but for some reason they have sat on our window sill ever since we got them, entirely unused.

I was determined to change that today, and I had intended to make some sweet potato and black bean enchiladas - turns out we had neither black beans nor enchilada sauce and I was not about to go out in the cold and face the pre-Thanksgiving crowds at the grocery stores. Instead I started browsing foodgawker for sweet potato recipes trying to find something that used ingredients I already had at home. I came across a recipe for a grilled sweet potato and zucchini salad that looked very pretty, but I only had some of the ingredients so I started improvising. Here is what I came up with:

Warm Sweet Potato and Kale Salad (adapted from here)
1 large or 2 small sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced thinly
1 small onion, sliced thinly (about 1/2 cup)
1 cup frozen corn
1 link Field Roast Apple-Sage Sausage, diced
5-6 leaves of kale, stems removed and cut into thin strips
1.5 T  balsamic vinegar
3 T extra-virgin olive oil (plus extra for sauteing and roasting)
1 T fresh chopped rosemary
1 T chopped fresh oregano
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup fresh Parmesan cheese (shavings or shredded)

1) Preheat oven to 425 - toss the thin slices of sweet potato with olive oil, salt and pepper and arrange on a baking sheet in a thin layer (my baking sheet was too small to do a single layer so I stacked them into two layers and it worked fine). Roast for ~10minutes, turning once or twice, or until sweet potatoes are soft and some are slightly crispy on the edges.
2) Saute the onions over medium-high heat until soft, add the diced sausage and cook for another few minutes. Add in the corn and cook until heated through.
3) Combine the oil, vinegar, herbs, salt and pepper in a large bowl - add in the warm sweet potatoes and the onion, sausage, corn mixture and toss to coat. Pour over the chopped kale and toss - let sit for a few minutes until the kale is slightly wilted. Top with the shaved parmesan.

I really enjoyed the end result - Jonathan said it was interesting, which is usually code for not something he is crazy about, but then he ate about three servings of it and continued to eat out of the severing bowl after he was done. I think that means it was pretty good.

Now on to Chex Mix. This is another food item that I have strong opinions about, it is not something that is to be bought pre-made from the store, or even made in the microwave (I don't even know how that is possible or why they would advertise that). Like pie crust, Chex Mix is something my Grandma has always made and she passed that love on to me. It's really super simple, but so so so much more delicious than the store bought kind.

Every time I make Chex Mix I think about the first time I helped my Grandma make it - I wasn't a young child, I was 15 and my boyfriend at the time had recently gone vegan. He had always really like my Grandma's Chex Mix though so I decided that I would make a vegan version of it for him and his sister who was also vegan. I got some Earth Balance to replace the butter and went to work. I was pretty proud of my vegan Chex Mix, until I brought it to their house and his mom - looking amazed - asked me where I found Worcestershire sauce without anchovies.  And that was one of many lessons in reading labels for ingredients, because it had absolutely never occurred to me that this sauce we were adding to the mixture might possibly have some component that wasn't vegan, let alone vegetarian!

Well good news for me - there really is a vegan version of Worcestershire sauce! I may not have used it that first time, but at least I learned. There aren't many ingredients involved in making Chex Mix, and I narrowed my own version down even more so it has just the things I like in it. You see, if you used mix nuts then I would spend the whole time searching for just the cashews, so that's all I use.

You'll need: wheat, corn, and rice Chex cereal, cashews, pretzels, butter, Worcestershire sauce (vegan!), garlic powder, and seasoning salt.

1) Preheat the oven to 250 - while the oven is heating I use this time to melt the butter, just throw the whole stick (yep - all 8 Tbs.) into a large pan - and I mean large - and place in the oven to melt.
2) Mix 2 Tbs. of Worcestershire sauce with 1.5 tsp of seasoning salt and 1 tsp of garlic powder. When the butter is melted, pour the seasoning mixture into the pan and whisk together until combined.
3) Pour in 1-1.5 cups of cashews, 1 cup pretzels, 2 cups wheat Chex, 3-4 cups each of corn and rice Chex. Mix well to combine with the butter/seasoning mixture.
4) Bake for 1hr 15 minutes, stirring well every 15 minutes. Pour onto paper towels to cool - and really wait for it to cool, for whatever reason warm Chex Mix does not taste very good.
5) Try not to eat the whole batch in one sitting. It's tough.

Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and enjoy some time with family and friends! Next weekend we can look forward to Christmas trees and watching Christmas Vacation - yes!

-C

Thanksgiving Practice

I love Thanksgiving. That might be a little weird as a vegetarian since it's a holiday that is centered a lot around eating a turkey, but I still love it. I actually love pretty much every holiday, so I guess that isn't too surprising. But Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that makes me feel warm and fuzzy - you get to reflect on your year and remember all that you are thankful for, spend time with friends and family, and eat lots of delicious autumn inspired foods!

This weekend I had a lot of cooking that I wanted to do  - including several new recipes I wanted to try out. We started off the weekend with Gingerbread Doughnuts (I finally got that doughnut pan - SO much better than trying to fry them!) - I used this recipe and mostly followed it with the exception of using a flax seed egg in place of the real egg and almond milk instead of regular milk, plus I didn't buy the mini-doughnut pan so this recipe made 6 regular sized doughnuts for me.

I'm so excited about the baked doughnuts - they were really easy and, at least compared to fried doughnuts, fairly healthy. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself!

I actually jumped ahead a little bit here, because my cooking actually started the night before with pumpkin pies. It's been years since I've made a pumpkin pie and the last vegan recipe I used was one that called for tofu. I only had a pretty junky blender at that time and the tofu never quite blended into the rest of the batter which made for some interesting textures. Since then I've just kind of steered clear of any pumpkin pies.

This year though I was thinking about how a lot of other food bloggers often make multiple versions of the same thing to determine the best recipe. I usually have too many different things I want to make to try multiple versions of the same thing, but I thought maybe this pumpkin pie endeavor would benefit from trying different variations.

It turns out I only own one actual pie dish, so I used my springform pan for Pie #1 and made a graham cracker crust with a little ginger added. For this pie I used this recipe which was designed to be vegan and gluten free (I guess not so much though with my crust now, but I'm not gluten free so I don't particularly care). This recipe used coconut milk to add creaminess and tapioca flour and agar-agar to make the pie set up firm. The pie is also not baked - you cook the filling on the stove after you've cooked the agar-agar for a bit, which I found sort of interesting.

Pie #2 was your more traditional pumpkin pie - in fact, I used the Libby's Pumpkin Pie recipe and just substituted the eggs with flax seed eggs. For the crust I just halved the crust recipe I've posted here before.

Both pies turned out decent - I'm not certain I was in love with either one entirely, but then again maybe I just don't love pumpkin pie in general - it has to have been at least 10 years since I've had a regular pumpkin pie so I don't really remember. Overall the verdict was that the filling from Pie #1 with the crust from Pie #2 would have made the best pie.

I also tried out this recipe for a roasted pumpkin (I used butternut squash instead) salad - I failed on taking on pictures of it since we were caught up chatting with our friends once they arrived for dinner, but it was actually a rather pretty salad. I was worried that it was going to be awful because when I tasted the dressing by itself I really didn't care for it, but once all of the flavors were together I think it worked a lot better. There are a few things I would change if I decide to make this to bring to Thanksgiving though - cooking the rice differently (it was a little mushy and I think a drier rice would have been better), and cutting the onions in half to roast even though they were small - I think the salad would have been better with more onions evenly distributed throughout.

I may still have to try a few more recipes before I decide on what to bring back to Washington with me this year, but I guarantee you something will have squash in it!

-C

Sunday Dinner: Spicy Italian Sausage Soup and Apple Pie

I missed writing about Sunday dinner last week - I was actually in San Diego (or really San Marcos) visiting a friend but we did make a nice dinner! She'd never had a delicata squash before so we made the stuffed squash I've posted on the blog before (veggie sausage, onions, mushrooms, apple, hazelnuts, etc) and it was a hit! I love making things that people have never tried and having them love it!

This weekend I knew I wanted to make soup since we had celery from the harvest box, still about a million carrots, and onions. Jonathan asked for sausage soup, which I had never actually considered as a soup ingredient. We did some searching and settled on a recipe for a spicy Italian sausage soup (I used the Field Roast version of Italian sausage of course). It turned out really good - I eliminated about half of the liquid from the original recipe to make it a bit more stew like and I think that was a good call, there would have been far too much broth otherwise. You can find the recipe as I used it below, or click the link to get the original recipe!

Spicy Sausage Soup (adapted from here)
1 package Field Roast Italian Sausage (4 links, ~3/4lbs)
1 large onion, chopped
2-3 stalks celery, diced
2-3 carrots, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp tomato paste
32 ounces vegetable stock (I actually used a vegan chicken flavored Better Than Bouillon)
1 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. dried basil
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
4 medium potatoes, cut into bite-sized pieces
salt and pepper to taste

*Dice up the sausage and cook with a bit of olive oil until lightly browned - set aside.
*Saute the onion, carrots, and celery in olive oil for about 5 minutes - add the garlic and tomato paste and cook for another few minutes.
*Add the stock, seasoning, and potatoes and cook for 15 minutes or until the potatoes are tender.
*Add the diced sausage and test for seasoning - enjoy!

 I also finally got around to making that apple pie that I have been meaning to for quite some time. We have almost as many apples as we have carrots to use up (18 lbs from the Harvest Box alone - plus the apples we got at the Portland Cider Festival!). Luckily Jonathan doesn't mind peeling and chopping apples - that's my least favorite part - so he did that while I made the crust. You can find the crust recipe in my post about blackberry pie - it didn't turn out quite as good as that one, but it was ok. Pie crust takes lots of practice I suppose! I think mainly I just needed to roll it thinner - there's always more apples I suppose!

-C

Sunday Dinner: Comfort Food

It's been quite a long time since my last Sunday Dinner post. Perhaps it's more of an Autumn/Winter sort of thing for me.

Yesterday, in an effort to make sure we continue to use up all of the produce from our Harvest Box, Jonathan and I went through the fridge and made a list of everything we had. It was a lot. It looked something like this:

Carrots (about a thousand)
Spinach
Beets (gross - I don't know what I will do with these)
Swiss chard
Kale (x2)
Beet greens
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Radicchio
Sweet Peppers (x6)
Eggplant
Potatoes (x3 bags)
Delicata Squash (x3)
Sunshine Squash

So I set out on a mission to try to use up some of this produce before the weekend was over otherwise there won't be any room for our new produce on Tuesday! My list now looks like this:

Carrots (still about a thousand)
Spinach
Beets (still gross, but I think I found a way to use them in a chocolate cake)
Swiss chard
Kale (x2)
Beet greens
Broccoli
Cauliflower (only partially crossed since I only used half of it)
Radicchio
Sweet Peppers (x6 x3)
Eggplant
Potatoes (x3 bags x2 bags)
Delicata Squash (x3 x2)
Sunshine Squash
Not quite the progress I had hoped, but it's a start. I also have plans to finish the kale, chard, and beet greens tomorrow so that will be helpful.

On to comfort food though - I definitely have seasonal cravings. I've been eyeing those delicata squash for awhile, I think they are best served simple - sliced, tossed in some olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted until tender. I've also been really wanting one of Field Roast's Celebration Roasts, but turns out I can't find it anywhere in Corvallis anymore! This makes me very sad.

The co-op did have their version of meatloaf though, which Jonathan convinced me to try even though "meatloaf" is kind of freaky. I don't typically attempt to recreate vegetarian versions of items I wouldn't have eaten in their regular animal product form, but since I was severely lacking in the other Field Roast departments I thought I might as well give it a shot. Turns out it's pretty delicious! I should have known - those people at Field Roast never let me down.

We ended up having "meatloaf", roasted delicata squash, rosemary roasted potatoes, and kale salad with cranberries and pepitas. I was pretty happy with all of the end results - I seriously love this season, hope you're enjoying it too!

-C