Chicken and biscuit casserole

Chicken and biscuits: is there really any more perfect comfort food?

OK, well, yes, a boatload of salted oatmeal cookies would be even more perfect in my book, so I should have clarified:

Is there any more perfect dinnertime comfort food?

I'm excited to share this particular version of chicken and biscuits with you for several reasons:

1) It's the result of a little Ninja-like recipe fusion
2) It's the perfect vehicle for Thanksgiving leftovers (because clearly you realize "Chicken and Biscuits" can easily become "Turkey and Biscuits")

And, since today is Thanksgiving for my Canadian friends (have a happy one, peeps!) and our own version is rapidly approaching, it's also very timely.

Fusion-wise, here's the story. Despite my love of bacon, I'm always trying to work more healthy, veggie-packed dishes into our dinner routine. Unfortunately, as regular readers will recall, Mr. Ninj is not a fan of most vegetables: he has texture issues. Tops on the texture issue list is squash. Even yummy squash like acorn or butternut -- even bathed in maple syrup and butter -- get a big thumbs-down.

Sniff: more foods to add to my ever-growing "recipes to make only when Mr. Ninj is out of town" list.

Therefore,  I came across a "turkey pot pie" recipe that included a sweet potato topping, I figured I'd be OK. I mean, sweet potatoes are just potatoes, right?

Wrong. Apparently they are too closely aligned with squash, both in color and texture.

(I know, right? WTF?)

I, on the other hand, loved the recipe and wasn't quite willing to let it go. Since it billed itself as "pot pie" (the only pot pie-ish thing was the filling, though), I realized I could probably substitute a bready or crusty topping and still be able to keep it in the recipe rotation.

So I pulled out my secret weapon: easy-peasy drop biscuits. I made the "pot pie" filling and topped it with some blobs of biscuit dough and baked that bad boy into a rich, comforting casserole.

Folks, we have a winner.

Make your own vegetable powders

Via Facebook and Twitter, I'm still reading about folks putting up the last of their tomatoes for the winter, so I think you'll find this post quite timely.

While I do grow my own tomatoes in my garden, my yield is often not what I hope. I have also had much better luck with small, prolific tomatoes like Sungolds than with bigger, beefier tomatoes, ideal for slicing and canning.

So, like many of you, I usually turn to my local farmers when it's time to put up tomatoes for the winter.

This year, I bought half a bushel.

Now, that may not seem like much but, trust me, when you wash them and line them up on the kitchen counter, it's a lot.

And I mean A LOT.

I didn't weigh my box but a quick search shows that the standard weight for a bushel of tomatoes in the United States is 53 pounds. So I'm guessing I had about 25 pounds of tomatoes.

Instead of simply making the whole lot into sauce for the freezer, I got a little creative this year.

Sausage rolls

After the last staggeringly sugary pear honey post, I figured you deserved a shot of savory.

Bring on the pork!

(Which is actually quite fitting, as today as is my wedding anniversary and it was Mr. Ninj who convinced me, many years ago, to give sausage and bacon another shot; now I love all three of them more than anything.)

I had my first sausage roll (well, it was a pasty but same diff) when Mr. Ninj and I took a trip to the UK a number of years ago. My reaction?

WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?

Yeah, they were some pretty damned addictive sausage rolls.

I made them a few times at home but they never tasted quite the same, which meant they fell out of meal rotation.

So thank the sweet baby jesus that I have a copy of Melissa Pasanen's and Rick Gencarelli's Cooking With Shelburne Farms and I happened to pick it up last week. The book has recipes for all the seasons, but for some reason I tend to gravitate toward it almost exclusively in the fall.

(I hope it's not simply because the cover is brown. That would be so incredibly lame of me.)

It is more likely because I think fall is the perfect time to cook what I think of as the best Vermont foods: earthy squash, crisp apples, hot cheesy soups, make-the-whole-house-smell-like-a-holiday roasting meat.

Pear honey

If you like jam you'll love this vintage recipe for pear honey -- sweet and spreadable with a hint of ginger. Enjoy it on toast, muffins or even as a basting sauce for chicken!

I have been looking so forward to writing this post.

And not simply for the opportunity to introduce you to pear honey (it's not really honey, honey, but we'll get to that in a minute) but rather to talk about backstories.

My sister-in-law once asked me how I decide what to put on the blog. Largely, my inspiration comes from the seemingly never-ending supply of food magazines to which I subscribe (probably too many), Pinterest pins (probably too many) and aha! moments of my own (probably not enough).

And then sometimes they are simply handed to me.

A few weeks ago, given the overwhelming number of pears we got from our trees this year (yay, pear trees -- keep up the good work!), I made and posted about pear butter. Yum. In sharing a link to the pear butter post on my Facebook page, a follower commented something Amazon-ish like "If you like pear butter, you should try pear honey."

Here's where the backstory gets interesting: The commenting follower was Margaret, a college classmate of mine that I didn't know well as an undergrad and have only come to know better and consider a friend in the past few years, thanks to Facebook and 5-year-interval college reunions. In her comment, she mentioned that her mother used to make pear honey all the time.

Whaaaa? Pear honey? I was intrigued.

I (of course) googled around and found that pear honey isn't honey at all but actually a sweet pear jam. Bizarrely, it's made with pears, sugar and ... wait for it ... canned pineapple.

I know, right? Who the hell decides to put these things together for the first time? "You know what this pear jam needs? PINEAPPLE!"

Whatevs.

But I was willing to take Margaret's word for it. But given the variety of recipes for pear honey on the interwebs claiming to be "the best," I decided to go for a proven recipe: I asked Margaret if her mother, Helen, would be willing to share her recipe.

Pumpkinpalooza

OK, OK -- it's officially October 1 now. Bring on Pumpkinpalooza!

Carrot cake cookies

 
It's still September, so I'm still not talking about pumpkin.

(I'm beginning to think I'm the only blogger who is not.)

What we're talking about today is carrots. Well, really what we're talking about is carrot cake cookies, but that's only because I'm slightly crazy.

Seriously: Am I the only person that gleefully plans and plants a huge garden full of vegetables, only to find at harvest time that I'm trying to turn them into baked goods instead of savory side dishes?

Crap: I finally may be developing a sweet tooth after all.

Even though we have had two pretty significant frosts already here in Vermont, I'm still getting a few things from the garden. I have a little bit of kale, which I had better hurry up and harvest before the deer find it (bastards!), and carrots.

This year marked my first attempt at growing carrots: It was a success! It's so rewarding to see the little orange tippity top of a carrot poking through the ground and then to pull it up. Gasp! It's a real carrot! That I grew!

(It's the little things, really.)

The fun and wonder begins to wear off as you pull up carrot after carrot after carrot. And realize that you don't particularly like cooked carrots.

Uh oh.

Slow cooker beef chili

I feel slightly disloyal by posting this chili recipe.

One of my favorite easy recipes -- and one of yours as well, given how many times it has been viewed and pinned -- is my crockpot turkey chili with butternut squash. It's my go-to lazy day recipe in the fall.

So I tried to keep it quiet when I decided to try a beef chili. I just assumed that there was no way it would be as good as my turkey chili and I could just move on.

Well, clearly I didn't move on.

Now, I'm not going to say that one is better than the other. They are distinctly different. The beef chili is old school with a twist, while the turkey chili is new school (so to speak) with old-school comfort and feel.

I will not make you choose. There will be no contest. There will be no declaring a winner or calling one superior or even the best (I reserve "best" for the cornbread that you will want to make to go with either chili -- best EVAH).

It all depends what you're in the mood for: nouveau or traditional.

Today, we're talking traditional. Beef, beans, chili powder -- the whole nine yards.

Roasted pear and cardamom butter

Holy crap, we've got tons of pears in the wee orchard!

Regular readers will know how amazing this is, after the Great Pear Theft of 2011 (thanks to the deer and possibly a bear) and the Great Season of No Damned Fruit At All of 2012 (thanks to the weather). Although, to be fair, the animal thieves did teach me that I could harvest the fruit by shaking the tree while I waited for my fancy new fruit picker to be delivered.

We have two pear trees -- a seckel and a Bartlett (I think) -- in amongst a bunch of apple trees, two sour cherry trees, one plum and one peach, which must have heard me talking about how I thought it was dead and was going to cut it down because it yielded a number of peaches in its own defense this year ("I'm not dead yet!").

When we purchased the farmette several years ago, I was more than a little excited about the wee orchard, envisioning the lovely pears and apples that I could pick and eat or turn into gorgeous desserts.

But it's time for a reality check: homegrown fruit is damned ugly.

Unless of course you want to spend most of your time -- I mean a LOT of time -- monitoring the trees, spraying for diseases and handpicking gross-ass caterpillars and bugs, you're going to end up with ugly fruit. Mr. Ninj spoke recently with the owner of a commercial apple orchard; he talked about how they have a team that walks around the orchard with a laptop, monitoring the trees and feeding the data into special software programs that show them the short time windows they have to spray the trees to avoid massive fruit loss due to fungal infections and the like.

Um ... no thanks. The Ninj and her laptop don't have that kind of time.

CSA Share Ninja Rescue 2013: tomatoes and winter squash (13 ideas)

This is the final installment for 2013 of my CSA Share Ninja Rescue, a weekly feature in which you tell me on Fridays what veg you got in your CSA share box (or found at the farmers' market) that you don't know what to do with and I'll give you a whole bunch of recipe ideas on the following Monday.

Even though I'm wrapping up this feature for this year, I know that many of you will continue receiving CSA shares well into the fall and perhaps even through the winter; if you need some ideas, feel free to message me or post your request on my Facebook page.

And rest assured that the CSA Share Ninja Rescue will be back in 2014 as well.

But for now, since it's nearly fall, I thought I'd leave you with ideas for two perfect transition veggies: tomatoes, which are signaling the end of summer (and the ramp-up of crazed canning season!), and winter squash, which heralds the arrival of fall.

Please note that I am skipping pumpkin. This is for two reasons:

1. I respect seasonality. Therefore, I recently pledged not to jump into the pumpkin patch until it is truly pumpkin season (read: October 1), no matter what Starbucks' latte menu says.
2. I'm sure you're being inundated on blogs, Facebook and Pinterest with pumpkin EVERYTHING, so I doubt you're out of ideas quite yet.

Many thanks to all of you who have made requests or left comments this year. As I always note, this feature is only successful when you participate and tell me what you need -- and we were very successful indeed in 2013!

Now, the recipe ideas...

Tomatoes

• Tiny tomato bisque: Easy and quick, this bisque is equally as delicious with fresh or frozen tomatoes (the recipe is at the very end of the post)
• Tomato jam: Made with fresh tomatoes, this is a wonderful savory condiment to use throughout the tomato-less winter
• Green tomato cake: I make a few of these spice cakes and freeze them when I'm forced, by an impending frost, to pull all the unripened tomatoes off my plants (that should happen soon, unfortunately)
• Bloody Mary tomato salad: A salad that tastes almost like a cocktail -- one of my faves!
• Fresh tomato and sausage ragu: Kick your pasta up several notches with this delicious sauce
• Gazpacho: Perhaps the easiest and most delicious way to use up nearly everything from your CSA share all at once
• Marinated Dried Tomatoes: ZOMG -- I love these! They are so wonderfully tangy on pizzas and even better when rehydrated in a cream sauce over pasta

Winter Squash

• Curried acorn squash soup:  I see this as a lovely soup for lunch or a light dinner
• Acorn squash muffins: Delightful for breakfast or an afternoon snack -- or even as a substitute for cornbread with chili (see below)
• Roasted butternut squash with quinoa, sausage and greens: Amazing fall flavor and full of whole-grain goodness
• Crockpot turkey chili with butternut squash and apples: Loaded with veggies and beans, this is a fall-flavorful riff on traditional chili about which my readers rave (there's a bonus cornbread recipe in there as well!)
• Butternut squash gnocchi with sage brown butter: Don't let the craptacular photo put you off -- this is some wonderful pasta, made with squash instead of potatoes
• Butternut squash-infused rum: I'm planning to mix this rum with ginger beer for a signature Thanksgiving cocktail

So ... what was your favorite recipe (or recipes) from the 2013 CSA Share Ninja Rescue? Leave a comment: The Ninj wants to know.

Blueberry bread

Blueberry bread -- a sturdy, not-too-sweet bread with a delightfully crunchy top for breakfast for breakfast or snacking. 

Yes, it is September and I am a food blogger -- but The Ninj is not posting about pumpkin.

It seems to me that the "Summer is dead, long live Fall" battle cry happened far, far too early this year. Weeks before Labor Day, I saw Halloween candy for sale in the grocery store, and the number of pumpkin recipes appearing on food blogs is overwhelming.

And, frankly, absurd. I can't imagine anyone has very many pumpkins popping up in the garden quite yet.

What happened to seasonality, people??!!

Which is why The Ninj is making a solemn pledge to stay out of the freakin' pumpkin patch until October, when pumpkins are seasonally appropriate. You have my word.

This is also why I'm sharing a great recipe for blueberry bread today. I'm still harvesting blueberries off my backyard bushes, and I just passed an open Pick-Your-Own blueberry farm yesterday.

Seasonality. Say it with me. Say it to your friends. Write it on your favorite bloggers' Facebook pages.