Baked apple, smoked turkey and cheddar strata: a recipe

Foliage, not strata

We've been through this before, but some dishes simply don't photograph well.

Just in case you were wondering why there's a picture of some lovely fall foliage rather than some strata.

I tried, really I did. I even bought a cool new blue plate to add a pop of color. But three shades of beige are just three shades of beige -- albeit on a cool blue plate.

So you get foliage instead: colorful rather than colorless.

However, don't discount the strata itself. I decided to make it last Monday, as a tip o' the hat to Canadian Thanksgiving, and it didn't disappoint. Fall flavors wrapped up in baked custardy goodness: perfect for either dinner or brunch.

I'm happy to report also that it comes from Melissa Pasanen's and Rick Gencarelli's Cooking with Shelburne Farms, so it's a recipe right from my neck of the woods. As regular readers know, I'm lucky enough to have recently moved to Vermont, which is handily helping me fulfill my goals of eating locally daily.

Salted lemon muffins: a recipe

Salted lemon muffin

I blame the salted oatmeal cookies.

Ever since they came into my life, I've been obsessed with finding other mouth-watering salty-sweet combinations.

This time, I forced it.

When I saw "lemon salt lemon cupcakes" as a link in my RSS feed, I jumped on it. It was a post from Helene at her lovely lovely lovely blog, Tartelette (I aspire to taking such amazing yet simple photographs -- someday, when I've graduated from point-and-shoot, I think).

Helene's cupcakes look delightful, with a beautifully light buttercream frosting and just a hint of salt. But, you know me, if there's frosting on it, I can't call it "breakfast" without guilt, so I decided to morph the cupcakes into muffins.

Slow-cooker leek, potato and spinach soup: a recipe

Enjoy this easy recipe riff on the classic vichyssoise: potato leek soup with spinach made in a slow cooker. 


We had our first major frost the other night: it went down to about 23 degrees.

Dag. That's cold.

I dressed the remains of my garden in some little blankies and they did just fine. I'd like to be able to harvest at least a few of the radishes and turnips that I planted last month before I have to say good-bye for the winter.

But the turn in the weather means that I have stopped thinking about tomatoes in favor of butternut squash. Fall things. Warm things. Casseroles and soups, for instance.

In other words: it's slow cooker season.

I love the set-it-and-forget-it nature of the slow cooker. This past weekend, we had houseguests and wanted to spend Sunday touring the area and visiting a local museum. So I put all the fixings of a chicken pot pie (of a sort) into the crockpot before we left and when we got home later, dinner was waiting.

Not to mention that the house smelled awesome.

And if slow cooker meals are easy, slow cooker soup is nearly effortless. 

Pumpkin soup with Gruyere: a recipe

Pumpkin soup with Gruyere

I love cooking from magazines but sometimes their ingredient lists send me on a bit of a wild goose chase.

Enter this pumpkin soup recipe from the October issue of Bon Appetit.

The soup is cooked in the pumpkin itself so the authors advise choosing a variety of pumpkin that will hold up well in the oven. Think about what a colossal mess you'd have if the pumpkin caved in on itself with all that liquid inside it. Yipes. So yes, great advice.

However, their recommendations for sturdy varieties include "Cheese" or "Jarrahdale."

Um ... say WHAT?

Now, granted, I live in the sticks so you'd expect I personally might not be as familiar with these varieties as our cosmopolitan recipe authors, but I do live in one of the locavore capitals of the United States and a place where heirloom varieties of anything can be pretty easily found at farmers markets, farm stands and even grocery stores.

So, undaunted, I headed off to a very large local farm stand, knowing that they supply not only local home cooks but also a lot of the high-end area restaurants and natural markets. Surely they'd have every kind of hip pumpkin that exists, right?

The owner had never even heard of these varieties. Great.

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday: pear chutney recipe

The original recipe uses this as a base for a bruschetta with blue cheese, pecans and herbs (which was awesome!) but it was so good solo that I'd recommend using as an accompaniment to roast pork or chicken, too.

Apple-pear crumble: a recipe

Apple-pear crumble

So I know I promised to have a bit more of a savory focus this week: apparently I lied.

But, come on, can you blame me? It's apple season and somehow I think you'd rather hear about a crumble than a pork loin.

At least, you only seem to comment on dessert posts.

I like this recipe (from The Joy of Baking) because it uses both pears and apples because I'd be hard-pressed to choose between the two if it was a one-fruit-only crumble. In fact, the original recipe calls for cranberries as well, making it a three-fruit crumble, but that just seemed like one fruit too many to me.

I have made this crumble several times now -- the second time necessitated by the fact that I forgot to take a photo of it the first time around and I really wanted to share it with you on this blog.

(Really, who could possibly object to a eating a yummy crumble twice? Not Mr. Ninj, I can assure you.)

Bittersweet chocolate cookies: a recipe

Bittersweet chocolate cookies: leaves, not trees

Another dessert recipe.

Is it too much for you?

I swear, I have made a whole bunch of other things to eat this week. We do not subsist solely on brownies and cookies.

I asked my Facebook followers to help me decide if I should make the Nutella cheesecake brownies or these chocolate cookies. They overwhelmingly voted for the brownies, but I felt I had to be fair to the cookies.

Especially since I just got these cute harvest-themed cookie cutters: pumpkins, turkeys and leaves.

The shapes seemed pretty obvious to me. However, we had a couple of plumbers in our house the day I made these and they thought they were balloons, chickens and christmas trees, respectively.

Right. Because nothing says "Happy Fall!" quite like chickens and balloons.

Nutella cheesecake brownies: a recipe

Nutella cheesecake brownies

As is evident just by the name, these brownies were wicked awesome.

But this is less a post about the recipe itself than it is about how I found it. Behold, the power of the internet.

I know, I know, this is not news.

I'm fully aware that my food blog is one of about 8 gazillion others out there, with all of us hoping that something may come from it but odds being that nothing ever will, other than our having a good time cooking, writing about it and meeting other folks who like to do the same.

The twist here is that I did not find this recipe via the usual round of link-to's from other food blogs. I found it on a relatively new site called Pinterest (thanks to Kim Chang for introducing me).

Blueberry oatmeal cookies: a recipe

Blueberry oatmeal cookies

Blueberry oatmeal cookies were not what I had planned.

Earlier in the week, I made a really yummy and easy apple and pear crumble -- so perfect for a Friday fall blog post. I even remembered to take some good prep shots, which I often forget to do.

I made it just after dinner, so there was insufficient natural light in my kitchen to photograph the final product. If I try to photograph food after sundown, it turns out looking like something you wouldn't want to see in the garbage, let alone eat, so I usually shoot post-sundown creations the next morning.

So we enjoyed half of it for dessert.

And then the other half for breakfast.

And only then did I realize I forgot the photo. Crap.

Very helpfully (and hungrily), Mr. Ninj suggested I simply make more, but by then the deer had finished off all the pears in the wee orchard (damned vermin -- be warned, hunting season begins in a mere two weeks and I've got big plans for venison jerky).

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday: Put 'Em Up

I received this Major Award in the mail yesterday; I can't wait to start making some of the great recipes.

I think I'll start with Cucumber Aqua Fresca...