Recipes – Little House on the Fairy Hill

Flexibility: My Secret Weapon

(For meal planning and life in general)

It is rare that our meal plans work out exactly the way we plan it. As the kids get older, their preferences for whether they spend the night with their Dad or Eli and I play out differently, and we are, and have always been pretty easygoing about the co-parent schedule. Life happens. No one feels like cooking what we planned or we run out of time.

I have learned over the years not to view meal plan changes as failures of my planning skills. They are simply a part of the mix – we end up needing to use something up, we have less or more people at the table than we though we would. Or something. The ability to be flexible is really, really important, as important as having the meal plan itself.

So when we got to Friday the 2nd week of February with chicken broth for chicken soup with rice in the crockpot, pizza dough cold-proofing, and the kids deciding that they wanted to hang with Dad for the weekend, in no small part due to a game they wanted to play there, I mixed it up. We postponed the soup and pizza to busier nights with kids and I pulled out my list of recipes.

Pizza dough and broth both freeze well.

We had skipped our meat share delivery in January for our planned pantry and freezer eat-down that never happened because life did, so when it showed up early in February, we were still bursting at the gills. And honestly when I take something out these days, I seem to put something in – this alone week I added butternut squash and sauteed mushrooms to the freezer, despite removing meats for meals – so it’s still pretty full!

I took out a pound of chicken and decided we should try a modified version of Crispy Chicken Ceasar Salad – modified because I neither had anchovy paste nor cabbage, but I did have a bag of slaw mix and lots of kale. I also added a whole avocado and some fresh basil to the dressing, because I could. And we didn’t have any bread so I toasted walnuts instead, with a little oil and Everything Bagel seasoning. I substituted fish sauce for anchovy paste at a ratio of 1:1.

It was honestly one of the best dinners I’ve made in a while. And listen, while it was not super frugal, it was decently frugal - because you slice the chicken breasts really thin, I got 8 cutlets of varying sizes out of it. The slaw mix was $3.49, the kale $1.40 (I used half a bunch and massaged it with a little olive oil and lemon juice to make it more tender, next time I would use the full bunch at $2.79) and the chicken was the splurge at $8/lb for our meat share. Call the dressing ingredients $3.50 and we’re talking about $16.39 for a meal we could not stop eating and left us with a teensy bit of salad, some more dressing, and 2 small chicken cutlets left over. I used all things I had.

But did I go get more slaw mix so we could eat it again? Yes, yes I did.

So what are we eating?

Use Up: avocados, sweet potatoes, squash, eggs

Lunches: Tuna Salad, Leftovers

Earlier this month:
Sunday: Baked Sage Chicken Meatballs with Parmesan Orzo. Except with ground turkey, and using mostly dried herbs rather than fresh because that’s what we had. Recommended by Ross Yoder over at Buzzfeed, who also recommends that amazing Chicken Ceasar I was raving about. I really like most of the things he recommends.

I really like meatball dishes, and I especially like it when I can make a double batch and freeze them for later. Which is precisely what I did. I’ll be honest. Good, but not to so good we’re rushing to have it again

Monday: Chicken soup with rice and popovers, the inevitable gift of the roaster chicken we had the prior week.

Tuesday: Just Eli and I, so salmon, roasted sweet potatoes and sauteed spinach with garlic, olive oil and salt.

Wednesday – Valentine’s Day: I found fresh heart-shaped ravioli and heart-shaped macarons at Costco, and what can I say, I’m a sucker. I made a meat sauce and a salad to go with.

Note: I used to be somewhat cynical about Valentine’s Day, but then Covid happened and now I am all in for all the celebrating. Go ahead, make up a holiday, we’ll celebrate it here.

Thursday: Thursdays my daughter had her riding lesson, and then usually spends the night with her Dad. Since it’s just Eli, our son and I, we went for super duper simple, Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken, Dumplings, Edamame and Rice. Total prep time – 5 to 7 nanoseconds. Especially good because Thursday was the stop between 2 celebrations/major dinners that week.

Friday: My daughter’s birthday, we got Sushi for dinner and had cheesecake

Saturday: The kids were with us last weekend, so I went heavily to their preferences. On Saturday we had the crispy chicken Ceasar again, but I made butter noodles and some sliced veggies for my son.

Sunday: Beef Bulgogi that I had marinated and frozen earlier, rice, roasted broccoli

This week

Saturday: My son had a friend over, and we had Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon, a house favorite (it’s even better as leftovers the next day), and popovers with some sliced cukes, tomatoes and avocados. While I don’t make this recipe often, as it’s not a very frugal meal to make, it’s really good, and one of the more-requested winter meals.

Sunday:

Breakfast was our favorite pancakes, bacon and strawberries

Chicken Souvlaki Bowls with Garlic Fries only I’ll use both sweet potatoes and potatoes. And I’m going to make this salad for Monday night so I peeled, cubed and roasted some butternut squash in preparation.
I’ll roast some broccoli to go with tonight’s dinner, since we have lots. I made tzatziki as well.
To help with meal prep, I’ll make some barbeque sauce, pickled onions, and maybe some kind of sweet for my son’s lunches.

I started prepping food and the meal plan and realized that the grocery delivery folks had brought me split chicken breasts instead of the boneless skinless variety. I had an emergency stash of boneless skinless chicken tenders that I had been saving for a larger meal – Costco packages being enormous – and took those out to thaw, and changed up my menu. As I also peeled and seeded the butternut squash for Monday’s salad I realized I was only going to need a little less than half, so I sliced the rest and put it in the freezer.

Why do I do so much cooking on the weekend? Because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have lunches, snacks or sweets.

Monday: Mondays are busy – the kids go back to school after vacation, my daughter has her skating lesson, and there’s not a lot of time to cook. I had been planning sliders, but instead we’ll have have Chicken and Rice Circa 1975 with the split chicken breasts, the Ina Garten salad referenced above and sliced avocado and cukes.

Tuesday: it’s just Eli and I we’ll make Lentil Sausage soup with leftover homemade bread. Leftovers keep me fed during the work day for a few days, after the beef stew and leftover chicken run out.

Wednesday: Another busy day here, but we have some pizza dough in the freezer, so BBQ chicken pizza and cheese pizza in the oven. I reserved a couple of chicken tenders from Sunday’s meal to go on the pizza.

Thursday: Salmon bowls over the last of the Fregola pasta (this stuff is not super frugal but it’s so good) with spinach and whatever other veggies we have.

Friday: the kids will likely go to their Dad’s, so Eli and I will try Crispy Black Bean Tacos with some guacamole

Saturday: If no kids again, we’ll make a Massaman Curry Stir Fry over cauliflower rice. Usually we use chicken, but we might switch to shrimp, since i have some in the freezer and we’ll have had a lot of chicken this week.

Sunday: the kids will come home again, and we’ll make homemade bolognese and have a pasta dinner. And we’ll prep something for Monday.

Do I think we’ll hit every meal I plan? Nope. But that’s ok. We’ll adapt.

Holiday Lights

The weather has finally turned cold, and although there’s still a lot of leaves on the trees, it’s definitely the tail end of it. Coats and boots are starting to be taken out of closets in the morning and we eat a lot of soup.

All the winter prep other than Eli finishing his project of covering the windows with insulating plastic – hopefully for the last time – is done. The chimney is cleaned, the firewood delivered, the furnace burners checked, the septic system is pumped. We’re pretty much ready for the winter months, or as ready as we can be.

In early November we took a 24 hour journey out to see my sister in upstate NY and came home with our annual haul of winter vegetables, as well as a large bag of books, borrowed reading material for the coming months of being inside.

Another Thanksgiving is complete, and I am grateful this year for so much. For my home, my family, my friends and my work. For the local food on my table, and the bounty that is our lives.

Right after Thanksgiving my husband and I scooted off to Newport RI for a night – we don’t get away much, but this was just perfect.

Last weekend I started using up our gorgeous haul of veggies.

Because I like to make one big breakfast each weekend, I made some pancakes, and there was a few leftover for a breakfast for someone this week. To that I added bacon and cut up strawberries. Once those were done I got the roasted vegetables started. We had already had some veggies in the fridge from our winter CSA share, so into an oiled baking pan went:

1 large turnip
1 very large sweet potato
1 also large beet
2 leeks
2 onions
6 cloves of garlic
2 parsnips
A handful of baby carrots

I peeled all the veggies and cut them into 1″(ish) chunks. I soaked the leeks in cold water after cutting them up so that any dirt would leach out. Then I tossed them in with salt, pepper, garlic powder, more olive oil, and about 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar. I baked them for 3 hours at 350, and then once dinner went into the oven I lowered that to 325 degrees. After about 5 hours they were done, creamy and caramelized. They cook down significantly, so I also made a salad.

Then I took on a new recipe, a slightly modified version of this Cider Braised Pot Roast. In the interest of pretty and slightly fall-celebratory, I put it in my Staub Pumpkin Cocette. Years ago when I got divorced I had to buy a bunch of things – think bedding, mattresses, silverware, etc – with not a lot of extra cash and very little time. I bought a ton from Overstock.com, and with the Overstock rewards dollars they gave me, I splurged on 2 things – the gorgeous pumpkin shaped dutch oven, and some really pretty, deeply discounted pumpkin dishware.

Turns out the dishes were cheap because they chipped easily, and only a few survive today, but the Cocette I’ve babied. I love this thing. I mean, I really love all things pumpkin shaped, but this was a splurge when I probably should have bought other things with the rewards dollars – but I’ve never regretted it. Good cooking tools are worth it, as long as you use them.

And the pot roast and potatoes were knock your socks off good. We’ll definitely be adding that recipe to the rotation.

I thawed some chicken thighs and breasts to use in Crockpot chicken and dumplings. Honestly I wasn’t impressed with any of the recipes online, so Monday morning after a quick run, I made up my own.

I put 4 chicken thighs and 2 breasts in the bottom of the crockpot, added a little homemade cream of chicken soup, carrots, onions, and a couple pinches of garlic powder, parsley, thyme, tarragon and some a couple of handfuls of frozen peas. I added some salt, and that…was about it for the next 6 hours. Then I added a bit of half and half to make it more creamy.

Then I made these dumplings, which were pretty good. I’m all about the cozy food right now.

I also stuffed spaghetti squash.

This week we’ll get our Christmas Tree, and share cooking as we get back to work from our 4-day weekend, and start getting ready for the holidays in earnest – we decorate every inch that we can of Sithean, and I love all the merry.

Tonight the kids will be home from their grandparents, and we’ll make a simple dinner of spaghetti and meatballs with a double batch of homemade sauce. I don’t have fresh herbs on hand, so I’ll substitute with dried. We bought a raspberry pie from a local farm, and that’s our surprise treat for dessert. And as a side I’ll make this Honey Mustard Kale Salad that’s one of my favorites.

Monday: Eli will make us his famous enchiladas and I’ll make mango salsa and hopefully the avocados will be ripe enough for guacamole.

Tuesday: Chicken Leg Quarters Circa 1975 (baked with rice that was first sauteed in butter with onion and garlic and a quart of chicken broth) with roasted veggies again, and bread. I’ll get up super early to prep everything so that at the end of the work day all we have to do is sit down to eat. Maybe a cucumber salad since we have some dill to use up.

Wednesday: Beef taco skillet and broccoli from the freezer. Both the kids have activities on Wednesday afternoons, so it’s extra busy.

Thursday: Eli will cook using up whatever proteins we need to eat.

Friday: Oven pizza and tree decorating! And I’m going to try this Balsamic Parmesan Brussels Sprouts recipe as a test run for Christmas.

Saturday: we have a dinner out in Boston at one of our favorite restaurants with the kids and their dad. Because Eli has to have a procedure in early December, we’re front-loading our holiday activities.

Sunday: I’ll start making Christmas cookies, and I’ll make some Parmesan Crusted Chicken, a french onion soup, and fresh bread.

Monday: We have some crab and lobster ravioli in the freezer from a sale last month, so I’ll make that, we’ll bread some fish and put a nice lemon caper sauce on top. That with a salad will be just right.

And that will do it. Lunches will be leftovers or sandwiches, and we’ll use up the oranges and apples we have to eat. I hope you have a warm and delicious week.

Morning Meal Prep

I was up before dawn on my son’s 11th birthday, something I often am, regardless of birthdays or not. This time was different though, because after 3 weeks of straight work travel followed by nearly a week lost to a bout of Covid, I felt like I was finally re-entering my life fully after having been gone for a while.

Literally and figuratively – not just the travel, but then 5 days of isolation from my family upon my return. My closet got organized as a result, and surfaces cleaned off once I started feeling better, but the absence was hard.

So as soon as i could I started throwing myself back into family life. And just in time, too.

I’m a huge believer in prepping food early in the morning, and prepping food for the week. We had already made batches of clam chowder and chili this week, which keeps us in lunches for quite some time.

We had a busy birthday day of celebrating ahead, and timing was going to be everything. The first thing I did was try to do as much prep as possible. Dinner was a cheese board, Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon, our favorite homemade Bread, salad and ChocolateChocolateChocolate Cake, a specialty of the house (this is chocolate cake mix, chocolate pudding mix and chocolate chips, I’ll share the complete recipe soon – for years it was a most-requested dessert in our family). But in the interim, my husband and I were chaperoning a pack of newly-minted 11 year olds to the mall to run amuk (within reason, of course) to test their independence. We would then turn around, come home, and he would oversee shepherding of the kids home while I prepped for dinner.

So I got up, made bread dough, fished the dried laundry out of the dryer for folding, and set to making sheet pan eggs for homemade breakfast sandwiches.

Sheet Pan Eggs:
15 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup shredded cheese
Salt and Pepper to taste

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F

Prep the sheet pan:
Oil the sheet pan and lay either parchment or foil on it and oil that, to ensure nothing sticks.

Make the eggs:
Stir together milk, eggs and seasoning until well combined. Pour into the prepared sheet pan (I use a jelly roll pan with high sides).

If you want to add some sauteed veggies or spinach, you can. Top with cheese and bake for about 15 minutes until set. Let it cool a minute and slice into squares.
I toasted buttered english muffins with a slice of Canadian bacon each (that I had left over from making homemade clam chowder a couple days earlier) and made homemade breakfast sandwiches. We ended up with 8, plus some extra slices of egg mixture. I served one each to my husband and my son, and froze the remaining sandwiches for easy breakfasts later.

Once the bread dough was prepped and rising and the cake was baked and cooling, I cut up the 2 pounds of strawberries that were on sale this week – a nice break from apples for a bit – I find they get consumed faster if i slice them up.

I also rinsed and cut up mushrooms for dinner, because we were going to be a bit tight for meal prep time when we got home. I had some extra, so I sliced those and sauteed them for a few minutes before freezing them for a future meal. I’m really trying not to waste food, and this is a great way to have just enough mushrooms ready and waiting for use.

At 8:41 the cake was cooling, the mushrooms in the freezer and fridge respectively, the bread dough was rising, the sandwiches in the freezer as well, and the remaining strawberries were chilling in a container in the fridge.

So why get up and prep? It’s a sanity and a money saver. These are meals ready to go. It used up the last of the store-bought eggs (I had also hardboiled some) as our newer chickens are finally laying. The old ladies in the coop are inconsistent, so we’ve had to buy eggs again, and we eat a lot of eggs. It means there’s a few less things we need to do when we get home from our busy day.

The 3-day weekend means I get an extra prep and chores day too, which is great, because I’m behind after getting sick. I’ll go into this week feeling good about our menu and what I’ve done to ensure we’re eating a healthy, varied diet even throughout the busiest of days. It’s the only thing that offsets ‘I’m too tired to cook‘.

And this isn’t just for family-havers. I remember an evening when my husband and I took the RV north to go hiking, and having all our meals prepped and just waiting to eat meant that we didn’t even consider eating out, we just excitedly got back, warmed the food in the oven, lit some candles, and felt lucky as heck to be where we were.

Food prep and meal plans are abundance. I hope your week feels as abundant as mine.

Why Recipes Are Just a Starting Point

I am not a big YouTube watcher – after talking on Zoom all day 8-10 hours a day, the last thing I want is to watch videos. Also, I just generally prefer the printed word, but a recent profile of June Xie on The Guardian got me watching.

This woman is a badass cook, and is much more along the lines of mostly how I grew up, with a bunch of things throw in a pot or pan, and very few measurements. It was creative, and cheap, and while there were definitely a few recipes that were followed to the letter, most of the time it was simple.

This past weekend found us very busy on Friday and into Saturday. Friday afternoon my son had a haircut, I had to run to the farm to get the next installment of our winter CSA, and then we had a much-delayed Azure Standard pickup. All 3 of those things meant our plan for homemade MYO pizza was off the table until Sunday, so I started picking through our very full freezer for options. I pulled out some pulled pork from Walden Local to thaw, and noodled around the interwebs for ideas. And found it – a tamale pie recipe. Which called for things we didn’t have.

I had ordered groceries – mostly based around the idea that we need lots and lots and lots of cheese for Thanksgiving appetizers, so it wasn’t hard to add (gasp!) a box of corn muffin mix to the order. Do I normally buy pre-made mixes? No, not really, but with only a few minutes here and there to cook, and hungry cold kids after school, I figured I had better take a couple of shortcuts.

I didn’t have creamed corn, but I did happen to have one random can of corn in the house, nor did I have sour cream, but I did have plain Greek yogurt. So I added a full cup of that, more than the recipe called for to offset the lack of cream in the corn.

I baked that, then I covered the top with some of the homemade refried beans I’d made and frozen a while back. Then I added the pulled pork but I also sauteed half a red pepper in with the onions and garlic for a little color and extra veggies (our current goal is to eat 30 varieties of plant-based foods a week) put the enchilada sauce on top of that, and then topped it with shredded cheese and baked it.

And that was how I loosely baked Delish’s Tamale Pie, but not really. At the end of the day my oldest pronounced it good, but it really could have used more flavor. Still, it was filling and warm on a cold night.

I’m a huge fan of the food renaissance that has occurred over the last 2 decades, and I love that people who make food are just as big as rock stars, because food is literally life. I adore trying new recipes, mostly on weekends when I have extra time. I take delight in feeding my family wonderful, healthy meals. I love learning about different cultures via their food.

But look – we all have to eat, right? And not every meal we eat needs to impress Gordon Ramsey. And I’m a fan of the idea that most of the time you shouldn’t be trying.

I mean that. What you should try for is: healthy, nourishing, tasty, and with variety. Pretty, too, I like a good looking meal. But you know what you shouldn’t worry about? Whether you used Himalayan Sea Salt or plain old table salt. If you didn’t use the Burrata the recipe called for vs. just some mozzarella. The pressure to follow recipes exactly and use ingredients that may or may not be out of your budget should be jettisoned.

Completely.

It was just as busy Saturday, so I got up early and tossed some stringy cuts of beef from our meat share into the crock pot with red wine, crushed tomatoes, and onions and carrots – the recipe called for celery but we didn’t have any and I never use it fast enough to make it worth buying – sauteed and then coated with a combination of cinnamon, allspice, pepper and cloves. 10 hours later the stringy beef was shreddable and it went well on top of pearl couscous and a cabbage slaw I just made up, with a dressing of the juice of 2 limes, a couple teaspoons of sugar, a generous scoop of plain Greek yogurt and a little bit of olive oil. I topped it with toasted pumpkin seeds.

This pot roast is always a hit in our house.

The slaw turned out great, even for my not-really-cabbage-loving husband, a win for the ‘use what’s in the house and use a recipe as a jumping off point’ method of feeding everyone.

Because it’s Thanksgiving week and our autumn bulk food stock up time, even though we don’t host this holiday, the pantry and freezers and fridge are literally bursting with food. We’re on for starters Thursday and a series of sides and a dessert for the other side of the family’s Saturday feast. On top of that, it’s holiday cookie baking season, and we ordered our Christmas turkey – oh how i love turkey – so that’s taking up a bunch of space in the freezer. Because everything is so full it’s easy to lose track of things, so I’m working extra hard to try and stay on top of what we have.

This week’s meal plan is a little wonkier than most because of the holidays.

Sunday: Homemade pizza with various toppings – finally! Pesto, fresh mozzarella, sauteed onions, sun dried tomatoes, sausage, shredded mozzarella and tomato sauce are all good options, but really any veggie or condiment we have in the house is fair game. Everyone chooses their own toppings for MYO night.

Monday: Leftover night – Parmesan-crusted chicken I made a while back and froze for a future meal, leftover Italian pot roast, with noodles or more pearl couscous, whatever the kids want. Sauteed spinach on the side, simple with garlic, oil and salt.

Tuesday: Eli Cooks..maybe homemade Empanadas

Wednesday: Chicken Gyros with Naan and tzatziki, a house favorite with roasted Brussels sprouts and onions on the side. Probably a cucumber salad too.

Thursday – Thanksgiving: We make some appetizers and plate some cheese and things. Then onto mashed potatoes and stuffing! Oh, and I’m making these (with sprite for the non-alcohol drinkers and littles) and this amazing salad.

Friday: If we get lucky my older sister and her family will be with us at lunch, and that’s likely going to be a pizza order. Eli and I head out to holiday shop and maybe we’ll get some delicious Indian food out as well. Not a frugal day!

Saturday: Thanksgiving #2. We’re on for creamed onions, a dessert, some wine and Cranberry-raspberry sauce.

Sunday: Time to cut down our Christmas tree, and we’ll need warm comfort food after that outing. Bread of some sort, either Foccacia or our traditional Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. I’ll pair it with One Skillet Greek Meatballs and Lemon Butter Orzo.

And then I’ll prep a dish for Monday, just to get us through. Occasionally our meal plan holds us through the week, but often things change and our plans get upended. Still, we mostly eat at home, even if it’s just some Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken, rice and sliced veggies because no one had time to cook. Or some ground beef and veggies in a simple stir fry over rice.

But we’ll be flexible. And if we don’t have an ingredient, we’ll find something we can use in our house or we’ll move on to another more fitting dish.

No-Recipe Recipes

It’s almost impossible to imagine that it’s already mid-October. Time seems to keep jumping forward at impossible speeds. We watched our local Fair open and close, and even braved it a couple times ourselves at not-so-busy times, rang in the number 9 for our son and went to visit my sister and her family in upstate NY, all within the month.

The garden is still producing spottily so I’m letting it run it’s course for a few more weeks. I have this weird aversion to ripping it out if even there’s a tiny chance of something ripening. And there are still – mystery squash, made mysterious by me forgetting what variety I planted and then proceeding to forget to go look in my seeds for the all-too-findable answer, are readying themselves in abundance, which is just fine with me, and a few lingering tomatoes and peppers still appear. With another week of 70-degree days ahead I expect a little more summer food out of it yet.

A trip to my sister’s invariably means a trip to the Carrot Barn and bulk fall foods to store and preserve. This time we came home not just with squashes and onions and sweet potatoes but also with half a bushel of tomatoes to can and slice. Not feeling like steaming the skins off and pureeing them, I instead decided to oven roast them before freezing.

Oven roasted is simple. Slice the tops off, slice them in half, and place on an oiled baking sheet. Roast them at 450 for 30 minutes and set aside to cool.

Peel the skins off and remove as much of the seed pulp as possible – squish them in your hand a little, then place in bags to freeze. When you defrost them they turn into sauce quickly (recipe to come). The key is to deal with them quickly, because hyper-ripe tomatoes go south fast. You can slice off any localized soft or black spots in tomatoes safely and still slice or roast them (really, you can) but typically you have about a day to use them.

I ended up with about 8 tomatoes left to use as slicers this week, so we’ll be eating a lot of tomatoes. Which is just fine with me, as everything I want these days is flavored with autumn.

Despite the warmth, it was time for roasted vegetables and a bit of creative, October-ish use of veggies, what I call the no-recipe recipes. Things that you just throw in the oven or in a pan, using what you have. Doing this is frugal, creative, and seasonal, plus healthy – all the things. One sweet potato I cut was the size of my forearm, and half of it remains in the fridge

We had 2 cabbages, so I sliced up one in an oiled pan with 4 onions and 2 Gala apples, and topped it with a bunch of sausage sliced in half. I added a few pats of butter and 1/4 cup of apple cider and roasted it for about 2 hours. I covered the pan with foil for all but the last 20 minutes or so. When you cook cabbage like this, it ‘melts’ into an ever-so-sweet and savory bed for the sausage, onion and apples.

Add to that a pan of beets, turnips, sweet potatoes, onions, leeks and carrots drizzled with olive oil and about 1/3 cup of balsamic vinegar and a sprinkle of rosemary, then roasted at 375 degrees F for about 4.5 hours and you have a tray of deliciously caramelized veggies that can be eaten with just about anything. Roasted veggies are remarkably filling and flexible and you don’t need to have a mix – try baking whole onions that way, or just a tray of whatever you have.

With a lightly salted plate of sliced tomatoes and a bit of leftover naan, Monday’s dinner dinner was simple, filling and we ate no less than 8 kinds of vegetables. Not to mention the turnips really needed to get eaten, so it was helpful in more than one ways. To eat seasonally and not waste much food takes work, but the work is so satisfying.

We bought fresh yellow and orange peppers in NY, so tonight Eli is making stuffed peppers with our Walden Local ground beef, and that too is an amalgamation of ideas – meat, sauce, cheese, cauliflower rice, put in the air fryer, which is a handy little tool we acquired for free from someone who didn’t want theirs.

Our food abundance is also a race against time to use up the things that need to get used, and that drives all our meals for a while. We’ll get back to intricate recipes in winter, but fall produce, commingled with the last few tastes of summer calls for use-what-you-have eating in it’s simplest form.

3 Rules to Make You a Better Cook

*Squashes Growing Out of the Garden and Into The Yard*

As July trails into August, the rainy weather continues a good deal of the time, with sunny days here and there. According to a local paper, we’ve received over 10 inches of rain this month vs. an average of 2.95, and last year’s low of just 1.9 inches. Even when the weather predicts sun, we see bouts of rain that hurls itself into the already-soaked ground. Other than a few basil plants I have not lost any garden plants yet, and most seem to be thriving, but I’m watching them all carefully.

The Ipswich River, where we canoe, has never been so high on the banks in my memory. Our paddles are peaceful and lovely, but the usual plethora of turtles and wildlife seem to have retreated. Hopefully just until the water table is lower.

Teddy objects to my ‘no jumping off the canoe into the water’ rule. Like the other members of my family, he acknowledges me as our household Fun Sponge, diminishing all the joy of wet dog in car. Photo by Eli 5 Stone

We are starting to hunker down again, with the Delta variant spreading. I’m grateful we got our vacations in this year, and some time to feel almost normal. And it’s time to turn inward anyway – not only is our prime food preservation time coming, but it’s time to focus on preparatory chores for the fall and winter. Getting our septic system pumped, cleaning windows, taking down some trees, and scheduling chimney sweeps and furnace maintenance are the top of the list. And then there is the back to school supplies that need to get ordered and the summer reading to be managed. All in all, we’ve got plenty to keep us busy at home, with occasional weekend hours devoted to hiking, canoeing, family activities or just doing nothing.

The first few zucchini have ripened in our garden, and more will follow soon enough. We still have shredded zucchini in the freezer from last year’s batch, but I’ve been rushing to use up the preserved everything so that I have space in the freezer for this year’s bounty. I am expanding my zucchini repertoire, so last night we tried a slightly modified version of this Zucchini Involtini. Instead of the pesto being spicy I used spicy italian sausage from our meat share. It was delicious, but it shows the benefits of recipe modification. I didn’t have the chicken sausage the recipe called for, but I had a perfect alternative.

I am tending to devote one day per weekend to inside chores and one day to outside (this primarily consists of weeding, which I could do 24/7 for weeks and still have work to do). On weekends I prep much of the week’s food. Yesterday I roasted eggplant and beets, cooked up sausage to go in our dinner, made a batch of fresh Pesto, and worked on Healthy Blueberry Cake, a favorite of Eli’s.

But I am working harder on a double challenge – to limit food waste (I’ve written about our food waste strategies here) and to get creative when I am out of something rather than just running to the store. This is a lifelong challenge for me – I love a good challenge, but sometimes lack of time impedes me flexing my creative muscles. On the weekends though, that’s often less true, and so I try out more complex meals, and work to get ahead of the week. Still recipe modification inherently limits food waste because you are using something you already have.

And more importantly it will make you a more confident cook. Which is really the goal. In order to get there, there’s just 3 rules to follow.

I made the pesto early in the morning after my walk, and then later in the afternoon I got to work on the rest. The eggplant was roasted for Baba Ghanoush, the beets to be Balsamic Roasted Beets for tonight’s dinner.

When it came time to make the Blueberry Cake I had to get more creative. I didn’t actually have applesauce, but I did have apples, having had a craving for them the last time we grocery shopped. So I peeled 3, chopped them up and cooked the apple pieces down in water.

The peels go to the chickens, the cores to the bunnies, the homemade applesauce into the cake. For us, apples are the perfect zero-waste food. Same with kale, where the leaves are food to humans and the stems are delicious bunny food. I also didn’t have 2 cups of plain yogurt as the recipe called for, so one of them is a cup of strawberry yogurt, and we’ll see how that goes, but I wasn’t driving to the store for a cup of yogurt.

I think key to the ability to modify a recipe is that rule 1 is: ‘what do I have’ vs. ‘what is it telling me to buy’. I could have mashed some bananas I have in the freezer as an alternative to applesauce as well. Would it have changed the flavor? Oh, sure maybe some. Probably it would have tasted just fine. Which leads me to rule 2: Who cares? So what if it changes it some? Maybe it will be better, maybe it will be fine, maybe you’ll decide it isn’t your favorite, but it’s food, not your best friend. Changing it up is just dandy.

We live in a world of celebrity cooks who write cookbooks that are full of good and interesting recipes and have lots of TV shows to tell us how to cook and also show us. I’m a huge fan of street foods and foods that mash up multiple cultural influences. I learn from other cooks all the time and I am grateful for it. But at the end of the day, learning how to chop onions really fast or certain kitchen tips is wonderful, empowering – but if it makes you think you aren’t chopping onions right and therefore not qualified to cook – then it’s time for rule 3: It’s what you want that matters because you, my friend, are the eater here. Gordon Ramsey or Ina Gartner are not cooking for you tonight, you are (I mean unless they are in which case, can I come over?).

You have pots, pans, food stuffs and a stomach. Don’t like pine nuts? Swap them for walnuts. No malt powder for your recipe? Try Ovaltine. Hate chestnuts in your stuffing or giblets in your gravy? Don’t add them. Love them? Add more! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Recipes and guidance from cookbooks and videos are awesome and can help.

But like all things in life, apply the universal wisdom of a checkout counter ‘penny dish’: take what you need and leave the rest.

Eat What You Have…and Eat Well

After 16 months of isolating from almost everything and everyone, we rolled the dice – with 3 out of 4 of us fully vaccinated, we went on vacation for a week. A big, splurge-y vacation to Turks and Caicos, complete with snorkeling, a day trip on a boat to see Iguanas and snorkel shipwrecks, and meals out on sandy beachfront outdoor restaurants. To keep it as safe as possible, we put my son, the only one of us that can’t yet get vaccinated, in the window seat on the planes and rented a house with access to a private beach in order to limit the people around us.

We returned home pleased with ourselves but very tired, and having spent more than we had all together in multiple preceding years on trips, which are mostly local for us. Still, it was on the pre-adoption list to bundle us all off to an exotic locale (which was supposed to be Paris last spring, but alas, pandemic) and this was just perfect for us – just enough of being in the world, but also somewhat isolated.

It was also enough traditional expensive vacation fun for several years. Our RV will hold us for a good long while, quite contentedly. I love to travel, and although beach vacations aren’t my typical thing, they are good for the soul now and then. And I discovered Conch Fritters, which are otherworldly.

After we got home we did our usual grocery stock up, and prepared to tighten our belts to hit some of our big goals over the next few years. We have a couple RV trips this summer, but cooking in is the name of the game most of the time, and once we’re there, most of the things we want to do are free or pretty cheap.

So – the kids have their first passport stamp of each of their lifetimes, we have a house full of groceries, and now it’s my job to both stretch everything, and start to clear out the freezers.

They are full to the brim, so that’s going to take a while, but it should be fun. Supplementing will be easy – we have our CSA just starting up, which includes a fruit share, the garden will start producing shortly, and we prepaid 6 months of our local meat delivery service. We’ll still need milk and some basics, but it’s my plan that we’ll be able to eat on what we have until the end of July.

In order to do that, meal planning, and the shopping I did for the next 6 weeks, falls into 3 distinct ingredient categories.

Staple meals we cook regularly, such as enchiladas and Bulgogi

A few special meals, based on recipes I want to try or create

Simple, seasonal meals

The last category is the really important one if you want to use up what you have and save money. I love cooking blogs as much as the next person, but if you try to make meals with specific, new ingredient lists all the time, you will end up spending a lot of money. It’s the simple, seasonal or sale stuff that will really save you.

For example, as part of our monthly meat delivery, we get a fair amount of sausage, more than we consistently eat. So tonight I took a package of sausage, put a can of diced tomatoes over it with a little salt, pepper and lemon juice over it, and baked it at 375 degrees for about 35 minutes. To this I added deviled eggs that I had made earlier in the day, a cucumber, tomato and onion salad, and some sauteed cauliflower rice.

I bought the cucumber and cherry tomatoes for the salad, but we had the eggs, cauliflower rice, sausage and diced tomatoes from previous shopping excursions, along with all the condiments we needed. The leftover salad will keep for a couple days, and serve as the basis for my lunch tomorrow at least.

Other than the deviled eggs, which take about 8 minutes to prepare, and the salad, which took less than that, there was really no work, and at the end a healthy, filling dinner was on the table.

There’s lots of tricks to saving money on food, but the ones that work for me are to keep it simple, and to plan ahead. I had spent a chunk of our plane ride home making a meal plan, so I knew what I was going to cook. I’ll spend a chunk of the weekend making food for the week, so it will be ready when we’re hungry.

What are some other meals we’ll make? We’ll, it’s grill season, so a basket of seasonal grilled vegetables along with our protein of choice will be a frequent thing. When it’s not too hot, popovers or bread to go with it. For bread that’s already been baked, put a little olive oil on the bread and grill that, too. Chicken leg quarters have been piling up in the freezer, so I’ll take a bunch out and marinate them, and cook them for dinner and lunches. This weekend I’ll make and freeze some pizza dough for Friday pizza night (it’s on my list to try to make tandoori chicken pizza for our next foray into the odd and possibly palatable). Homemade paninis are on the list too, especially when there’s the opportunity to choose your filling for each kid. Tacos, enchiladas, stir fry, and, when tomatoes are finally in season later this year, gazpacho. Lots of salads of varying kinds.

Will these meals require cookbooks and recipes? Some, maybe. I’m always on the lookout for a good marinade, or use for CSA and garden produce, which is how I learned to make Garlic Scape Pesto and all sorts of other things. But often it will be simple.

Which is exactly how summer should be.

Holiday Traditions

The bitter cold that had followed repeated snowfall and settled over New England for a week or so finally broke here yesterday, just in time for Christmas.

At nearly 40 degrees yesterday, it felt positively balmy as I was out shopping with my Mom, getting us stocked on groceries for the holiday and after.

With just a couple days left, it’s finally feeling like I might be ready for this holiday. My shopping is done, the packages and (most of) the cards are mailed, and while I’m still wrapping gifts, it’s getting there. I have one more day of work and then I’m on vacation through New Year’s, which I’m so ready for.

Christmas dinner is at my house this year. My former husband and I divide the day – someone gets morning, the kids waking up, and a leisurely breakfast, and someone gets the afternoon, Christmas dinner and a lazy December 26th. I like both, and I miss the kids for whatever part I don’t have, but I’m also at peace, knowing that they get a great day without either parent missing out on everything. Technically it was my year to have the morning, but seeing as my ex-husband just settled into his new house and is building traditions there, it seemed like the best thing. Traditions are great, everyone should have some, and none should be so set in stone that you can’t flex for changing situations.

Dinner this year is turkey, one of my more favorite winter dishes. I try to roast at least one a year. Making a big meal while trying to pull off Christmas magic can mean one person spends most of their day in the kitchen, so I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to hone what can be done in advance. And the answer is that a lot can be done. My four-cheese mashed potatoes will be made tomorrow and refridgerated overnight, to be baked just before eating. Sausage for the stuffing can be cooked tonight and left in the fridge to chill. Vegetables can be chopped and prepped the night before, as the turkey brines. Even stuffing bread can be cubed and bagged. And then there’s the benefit of keeping things simple – this year, just a very nice cheese board, with lots of little snacks such as marinated cippolini onions and mushrooms, olives, and feta spread, will precede dinner. Pretty, and easy to make, a cheese board is just the thing for a busy day.

But the simplest thing to prepare and serve, popular with even the kids, is my sister Sharon’s Cranberry-Raspberry sauce. This is our family variation of the traditional jellied stuff, and let me just say – it blows the doors off it. Not only is it beautiful, easy to make and delicious, the leftovers can be swirled into scones, muffins or quick breads, or used as a spread on toast instead of jam. I’ve never tried it as a cake filling between layers, but I’ve been mulling it over. In short, this is not a sauce that will sit and moulder in the back of the fridge, until it finally gets deposited in the trash (or in our case, the chicken coop) once it becomes a science experiment, complete with green fuzz.

You’ll want to eat this stuff, trust me.

And it couldn’t be easier.

You will need:

2 16-ounce bags of fresh cranberries
1 16 ounce package of fresh raspberries or the same amount frozen
2 ounces of water
Sprinkling of sugar
1/3 cup raspberry liqueur, such as Chambord

You put it in a pot. You boil it for a while on low heat until the raspberries break apart and the cranberries are soft.

Let it cool, give a whir with an immersion blender, and pop it in the fridge. You can skip the sugar if you want, but I don’t recommend skipping the liqueur – it’s what gives it the depth of flavor, and the alcohol will cook off. If it’s a little sweet, a dollop of lemon juice will help.

May you have a low stress and delicious holiday!

Final Harvest

November arrived with a huge windstorm that both postponed Trick-or-Treating until Saturday and brought down the leaves in volume from the maple, oak and ash trees. Their final display of gold and red regularly causes me to catch my breath, but the weather is turning cold this weekend, with our first frost, so that beauty will turn into the beginnings of winter, more stark than lush.

Our lawn has a leaf coat on it now, but I don’t really like to rake, and honestly leaving it until spring is the environmentally sound thing to do, so I’m considering whether to leave it messy or not. I try not to trade environmental soundness for appearances, but I hate being the only messy lawn on the block. Still, I’m working on living with my discomfort.

The last pumpkin is out of the garden, and I pulled the last batch of Tomatillos, plus a few ripening tomatoes this morning in advance of the upcoming cold. Tomorrow, we’ll wrap our fledgling fruit trees in their winter fleece coats, and next weekend I’ll be pulling up all the plants and vines, spreading a layer of compost on the beds and calling it a day until next spring.

I feel like a squirrel at this time of year, stocking up for the winter. A bushel of apples from our local orchard is in the fridge, while I wait for the delivery of my new dehydrator, bought with a wedding gift card. I love dried apple chips, on salads and just to munch on, and I will make a batch of apple sauce, which we mostly use for baking.

In a few weeks we’ll head to a farm near my sister in upstate New York and buy bushels of squash, sweet potatoes, and at least 20 lbs of onions, which should hold us until around February. Our farm share ended last week, and the last of the kale, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, garlic and shallots are being used up. In October, November and December the food bill spikes while we stockpile and fill the kitchen with holiday goodies, and then it winds down through February. While I know the grocery store will still be there, I think this is the way we humans are supposed to live, storing and preserving our food. I do it imperfectly. We can’t live on what we put up and store, and we’ll never have enough land to grow it all. And that’s ok, because part of the strategy is investment in local farms. This year, Vermont cheese fills my fridge, my vegetables and apples vary between zero and 6 food miles, I haven’t actually purchased an egg in months, and my meats now come within a 150-mile radius, which while it sounds like a lot, is 1/10th of the average of transported food and vegetables. That doesn’t necessarily outweigh the chips in the pantry or the other purchases, but I’d rather do this imperfectly and incrementally than all at once. For the same reason that diets fail, so does massive lifestyle change. My daughter and I spent some time at the local grocery store last weekend, and this weekend we are headed to HMart to stockpile some our Asian pantry and freezer staples.

The cold draws me to the kitchen, always. With the onset of chill, I feel pulled into the warmth of the oven. Last weekend it was cold and rainy, so I spent as much of my time in the kitchen as I could. This weekend will be the same – one last batch of Salsa Verde for holiday gifts, homemade potstickers, maybe a pot of chili.

One thing that happens at this time of year is that my fridge is filled with root veggies. With the final CSA pickup, and me not cooking as much due to some back-to-back travel it was time to use some things up – leeks, a very large golden beet, red and yellow onions, parsnip, carrots, mushrooms, a fennel bulb and a couple sweet potatoes went into the oiled pan, got covered in more olive oil and balsamic vinegar and then into the oven at 400 degrees F under aluminum foil. Roasted veggies are simple and delicious, needing only time and just a tiny bit of seasoning.

After about an hour, I tossed them a little, but left them covered. After hour two I uncover them, and then roast them for another hour or two more, until the veggies are soft and caramelized.

While they roasted, I moved on to the pint of Peppadew peppers I picked at the farm this week. Marinated stuffed Peppadews are a favorite of mine, but they are expensive. These, on the other hand, are not and it’s the same thing. I used this recipe, and now they are in the garage fridge waiting to be seeded and stuffed with goat cheese.

None of these recipes are particularly complex, which is part of the appeal. There’s a place for intricate food preparation, but during stocking up season, the key is to keep the food moving into it’s final form, so when winter comes, you still have a touch of spring and summer to sustain you, literally and figuratively.

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