Here’s another delicious recipe that has become a staple in our home. I love it because it comes together quickly and I usually have all of the ingredients on hand in my fridge and pantry. And with the cooler weather coming, or here, depending on where you are, it makes a perfect, stick-to-your-ribs, warming meal in one bowl!
A note about the potatoes: you can peel them if you want, but I usually use red potatoes and leave the skin on. It saves time, and looks pretty in the bowl, too. And for the diced ham, I usually buy Farmer John‘s Ham Steak. They come two steaks in a package and I use both in the soup. Milk could also take the place of the half and half, if you’re looking for a lower calorie count. I hope you enjoy!
3½ cup diced potatoes
1/3 cup diced celery
1/3 cup diced onion
¾ cup diced cooked ham
3 ½ cup water
2 Tbsp. Chicken bullion granules
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
6 Tbsp. butter
6 Tbsp. flour
2 cups half and half (thinned with milk, if necessary)
Directions:
1. Combine potatoes, celery, onion, ham, and water in pot and bring to a boil. Cook 10-15 minutes. Stir in bullion, salt, and pepper.
2. In a separate saucepan, melt butter over medium-low heat. Mix in flour and stir constantly until thick, about 1 minute. Slowly stir in half and half. Continue stirring constantly, about 4-5 minutes.
3. Stir milk mixture into potatoes and simmer until mixed through, about 1-2 minutes.
In Southern California, one of the harbingers of Fall is the Santa Ana winds.
These winds blow strong and unbelievably dry for days at a time, sometimes cold, but mostly hot, hot, hot. If you are not from So Cal, you may have heard this term related to some huge, catastrophic brush fire that occurred near Los Angeles. Every Southern Californian knows to scan the horizon often on days that the Santa Anas blow.
But these winds also signal a change in the weather. Summer is over, no matter how warm the temps during the day. The nights are cooler and backyard pools no longer hold the heat. The rest of the nation is digging out their jeans and sweatshirts—and it has snowed in the Rocky Mountains—and we’re still wearing shorts. But it’s Fall for sure when those Santa Ana winds blow. And when they do, I am pulled to my kitchen by thoughts of cinnamon, apples and pumpkins.
The other day, I pulled Dana with me. Over the weekend, my family made a quick jaunt to our local apple tree mecca, Oak Glen and picked 30 lbs of apples. Oak Glen is this special place, like someone carved a piece out of Colonial Massachusetts and plopped it down in the low mountains of San Bernardino.
Braeburns at Riley’s Apple Farm in Oak GlenMiss Annie picking her first apples!In a few weeks, these trees will be a gorgeous shade of yellow
I called Dana and invited her to come over and make apple butter and apple pie filling. She’s never canned before and we both thought this would be a good time for her to see what it’s all about.
We peeled and cored and sliced. Then we did it some more. Sixty apples are a LOT of apples to face down. But we did it.
A natural hazard of cooking with organic apples: stowaways.
And since we were on such a roll, I roasted a pumpkin and made some pumpkin butter.
Six hours of cooking and canning got us six half pints of apple butter, four half pints of pumpkin butter, three half pints of applesauce, three quarts of apple pie filling and enough pumpkin puree to make muffins or bread. Whew!*
All my canning recipes were from the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving.
Wash apples; peel, core and quarter. Combine apples and two cups of water in a pot; simmer until apples are soft. Using a food mill or food processor, process apples until they are pureed.
Combine the pureed apples, sugar and spices in pot. Cook on low until mixtures darkens and thickens (usually two hours or more). Stir about every 15 minutes to prevent burning on the bottom.
Wash, peel, core and quarter apples; simmer in pot with just enough water to prevent sticking; mash apples in pot; add sugar and spices (optional); bring applesauce to a boil.
Wash, core and peel apples; cut them lengthwise into 1/2 inch slices; treat with Fresh Fruit to prevent darkening (see directions on package).
Meanwhile, combine sugar, water and lemon juice in a large pot, stirring to dissolve sugar. Bring to a boil, reduce heat. Drain apples and add to mixture. Simmer for five minutes before water processing.
Roasted Pumpkin
Take a pumpkin, any pumpkin (most recipes suggest sugar pumpkins for baking, but I have used the ones they sell for jack o’ lanterns with no problems). Cut off the stem, then cut the pumpkin in half. Clean the pulp and seeds, set aside. Place the two halves face down on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes.
Remove from oven and scrap flesh from inside. Puree in a food processor.
This is exactly what comes out of the can when you buy pumpkin in a store. Proceed to your favorite pumpkin recipe!
5 cups fresh pumpkin puree (or 1 29 ounce + 1 15 ounce can of pumpkin puree)
1 cup brown sugar (or sucanat)
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon allspice
Pinch of sea salt
Preparation:
Combine all ingredients in a crock pot/slow cooker and stir to mix well.
Set on low heat and cover loosely, leaving a little space for the steam to escape so the mixture can reduce and thicken.
Cook for about 6 hours. The pumpkin butter should have cooked down and thickened. If it’s not as thick as you would like it, just take the lid completely off and let it cook for another 30-45 minutes.
Let cool, remove from crock pot and put pumpkin butter into jars or airtight containers.The pumpkin butter will last a week or so in the fridge, but you can also freezer preserve it by storing it freezer safe containers (or jars).
* I am not a canning expert. If you are interested in canning, please visit www.freshpreservingstore.com for products and guides, or www.foodinjars.com for recipes and how-to. Also, turns out it’s not safe to water process pumpkin butter at home, because of the chemistry.
Well, it’s official. Autumn is finally here! And no, I don’t mean just the arrival of the Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks (although that is quickly becoming one of my favorite things of autumn!).
I’ve always loved autumn, and when I moved to Austria, I fell in love with it even more. The changing of the seasons is visible everywhere there. The local restaurants begin to change their menus to represent the seasonal fare. My favorite restaurant in our town had something called Wild Woche or Wild Week in which they slow-roasted venison, wild boar, wild hare, all of which had been caught in our forest, and served them up in wonderful, hearty sauces, with earthy root vegetables, all meant to fatten the townspeople up, steeling us against the harsh winter that was sure to come.
But more than the beautiful colors, the comfort food, the inviting scents, there’s just something different in the air once autumn comes. I’ve always felt it, that magic electricity. It’s like in Mary Poppins when Burt sings “Winds in the East, mist comin’ in, like somethin’ is brewin’, about to begin!”
This past Sunday was the Autumnal Equinox, a time of equal light and equal darkness. The balance has tipped and we descend into darkness. This happens not only literally as the nights are now longer than the days, but for many people, it happens in a spiritual sense as well.
The bright warm days of summer, which beckon us outdoors to the beach, the mountains, or even just the backyard, are over. As the temperatures cool, we turn our focus inside, many of us decorating for fall and burning pumpkin-scented candles. Our tendency, when things get dark, it to turn on more light, to fill our already busy schedules with even more things.
But I invite you this autumn to take some time in the darkness, to sit quietly with your soul and take stock of what you have done this year. How have you grown? What seeds did you sow in the spring and tend in the summer that are now coming to harvest? How can you prepare yourself for the craziness that the holiday season can bring on?
Pull out your favorite snuggly sweater or blanket. Get some pumpkins to put on your front porch. Put some gourds on your mantle. Make some of your favorite comfort foods. And if you want a new favorite fall recipe, I’m sharing my very best one with you, A Kitchen Witch’s Pumpkin Spice Bread. And have a glorious autumn, everyone!
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, combine pumpkin, sugar, water, vegetable oil, and eggs. Beat until well mixed. Measure flour, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, baking powder, nutmeg, and ground cloves into a separate bowl, and stir until combined. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the pumpkin mixture, beating until smooth.
Grease two 9×5 inch loaf pans and dust with flour. Evenly divide the batter between the two pans. Bake for 60-70 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool 10-15 minutes then remove from pans by inverting them onto a rack and tapping the bottoms. Slice and serve plain, buttered, or with cream cheese.
We used to be scared of roasting a whole chicken. And not just because of the raw chicken thing. It seemed too much like roasting a turkey, and that’s a big dang deal.
But then we noticed that whole chickens are often on sale for less than $5 each. That was too good a deal to pass up for dinner and leftovers.
And then we found a really simple recipe in a Rebecca Katz’s cancer fighting cookbook called Chicken Roasted All the Way to Yum. And it is. Simple and easy and yum. Of course, we adapted it a bit. If you want her original recipe, go here.
Otherwise, you need just a few things: a roasting dish (we use a 9×13 pyrex baking dish); an orange; a lemon; salt, pepper and rosemary. And a whole chicken.
Take a deep breath, because you are about to be elbow deep inside that chicken.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Drain the chicken and remove the innards. This is important. We predict you will only ever forget once.
Place the chicken in the pan—legs facing up!!!
Mix a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of pepper in a small bowl; grab half and rub in the cavity of the chicken. Sprinkle the rest over the top.
Cut the lemon and orange. Squeeze the juice over the top of the chicken and stuff the rest inside the chicken.
Sprinkle chicken with whole dried rosemary.
Cook for 90 minutes, or until a meat thermometer stuck deep in the breast says the meat is done.
Carve and serve. There will be enough drippings for gravy (but that kind of defeats the purpose of healthy chicken…).
If you are really industrious, you can save the carcass and make Rebecca’s Magic Mineral Broth (just add the chicken carcass along with everything else), and then freeze and use for all your soups this Fall!
Jen cooked one of these Tuesday and forgot to take pictures. So instead, here’s a picture of what your plates will look like if you make this chicken.
In our part of the world, that means the kids are headed back to school soon and NFL players are reporting to training camp. As a bonus, the Dodgers are leading the NL West and the Giants suck.
All is well.
We thought we’d share a fun summer recipe we use with our kids. It’s a great go-to when the late summer fruit ripens a wee bit too quickly and is in danger of going in the trash.
Like these cherries I bought the other day. My kids won’t eat squishy and these got squishy fast.
I would hate to throw $6 of cherries away so I repurposed them into cherry yogurt pops.
I bought the pop maker at Vons for $1.99.
I use plain Greek yogurt, pure vanilla, honey and the cherries. I pitted the cherries with my handy dandy cherry pitter from Target. If you’ve never used one, I can tell you they are very useful but messy. Wear an apron and prepare for your sink to look like you killed something in it.
A cup of yogurt, a teaspoon of vanilla, a tablespoon of honey and about a cup of cherries (the fruit amount can be very loose—more or less, depending on how you like it to taste).
Hit the blender. Pour into the pop maker and freeze. Viola! Cheap and healthy summer treat. No squishy cherries, no wasted fruit.
Recipe:
1 cup(ish) pitted fresh cherries (or any squishy fruit or combination of squishy fruits on your counter)
1 cup plain, nonfat Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon vanilla
Mix together in blender until ingredients reach smoothie texture. Pour into ice pop maker and freeze.
Full Of Graces 