Pumpkin-Raisin Bread

I mentioned on Facebook awhile back, and I fully believe this to be true: when Jesus said "Man cannot live on bread alone," I'm pretty sure he was forgetting about pumpkin bread. It is, as far as I'm concerned, the perfect quick bread: sweet enough to spread on a little cream cheese frosting and call it dessert, but healthy enough to butter it and eat it for breakfast instead (or lunch, or dinner, or elevensies, or afternoon tea, or whenever you damn well please).

This recipe is slightly modified from one I found in The Red Plaid Cookbook, which I inherited from my mother, and is the cookbook of the gods:

Don't be fooled by the cover; all true disciples know that this is actually called "The Red Plaid Cookbook". (All true disciples being my mother and me.)

Their recipe is for pumpkin-nut bread, but I think it's better without the nuts. I also used slightly different seasonings, because I am very opinionated when it comes to pumpkin-flavored things. Anyway, let's begin.

I think a couple of the seasonings are missing here. That, or they're hidden behind the pumpkin and salt. I'm bad at photography.

Stuffed Acorn Squash

Have I mentioned my enormous love for winter squashes?

It's a little ridiculous. As soon as those things hit the grocery store shelves in September, I start stockpiling for the squashpocalypse.

Artist's rendering

My favorite way to eat just about any winter squash is roasted or mashed and doused with butter and maple syrup, but given the large amounts of squash in my house, I figure I have to mix it up now and again to avoid the diabeetus. (Also lest my husband stage a squash-madness- induced revolt.)

So one of my other favorite things to do with squash is to stuff it. There's a lot of leeway, as far as what tastes good stuffed into a squash, so here I'll just put the combination I came up with most recently. Feel free to get inspired and experiment with whatever you have on hand.

Mushroom and Bacon Casserole

I found this recipe in my Cooking Light magazine and couldn’t resist trying it. This could easily be altered to be meatless, though I did enjoy the bacon! It does require some chopping and work, but it’s a filling, warm winter dish!

Before baking in the oven (the heat of the dish had already mostly melted the cheese!).

Ends & Bits: Non-Fussy Pot Pie + Bonus Gin Cocktail

Refrigerator empty? Cupboards bare? Need to stretch the wilty remains of last week’s grocery run until next payday? Toss all those little ends and bits in a pan and make something delicious! This series explores the skill set of just “throwing together” a meal by looking at what you have available to work with and going from there. This takes a willingness to experiment and a bit of a knack for knowing what will taste delicious together. It also helps to have plenty of practice and exposure to a wide varieties of recipes with potential variations. It is in this spirit that we run our regular Ends & Bits series.

So I was having one of those days where nothing sounded good for dinner so I just didn't eat until I got a headache, realised I was being dumb, and decided I had to cook something. So I started with the advice of my old pal Carmel: Fry some onions. Just fry some onions and see where you end up.

I think this was original conveyed as a metaphor or life as well. Profound, yo.

So I started cutting up my onions to fry and realised we had bacon. Lots of bacon. "American-style" bacon even.

Spoiler: Australia does a lot of things really, really well. Bacon is not one of them. The "American-style" bacon my housemate found is an improvement. But... it tastes like the person who made it asked, "How is American bacon different than Australian bacon?" and then made it based off the answer without ever really trying American bacon.

 Anyway, I decided that the only thing better than frying onions was frying onions IN BACON, so I cut up some bacon along with my onion and started frying them all together and pondering what  I wanted this to end up as. About this point, I decided what I really wanted was a pot pie. Completely weather inappropriate to me, but it sounded delicious.

So I started doing a quick internet search for pot pie recipes and I was... underwhelmed by the results. They were all super fussy... Buy store-bought puff pastry and prepare it according to the instructions! Roast the vegetables first! Use only these exact vegetables! Then braise them slowly on the stovetop for four million hours! Make a roux separately and add it to the veggie slowly or you will ruin everything! Etc. And I just could not be fussed.

So I decided to just throw things together and see what happened. What happened was delicious:

Seriously delicious.

It takes a little bit of time to come together, but is incredible unfussy as a recipe. This is basically a "template" recipe--no strict ingredients, just vague proportions. (Thanks to Jules at The Stonesoup for the terminology of template recipes...they're basically the way I think about cooking.) The butter/margarine and some kind of flour are pretty essential, but everything else negotiable. Throw in whatever you have around!

Family Tradition: Green Potatoes

So as some of you may be aware Erik and I bough a house. We moved in to it on Monday and hosted Thanksgiving dinner on Friday. (Yes, yes we know Thanksgiving is on Thursday, but since most people only get Thursday and Friday off and many had to travel from far away it made sense to celebrate on Friday.  Also we needed that extra day.)  We had many of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans,  pies my mother made, and green potatoes. Wait, green potatoes?  People have heard about green eggs and ham, but when I mention green potatoes it usually doesn't ring a bell.  For the uninitiated, green potatoes are a Dutch tradition from Erik's mother's family.  And as the new bride I really wanted my Mother-in-law to be impressed with my ability to feed her son, so green potatoes were definitely on the menu (even though it meant we would have two potato dishes on the table).

Christmas Morning Cinnamon Rolls

We don't have a lot of food-based traditions in my family apart from Thanksgiving, and even those are mostly the same ones that everybody has: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, the souls of children, that sort of thing. But one that we do have is that my mom always makes cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. She usually gets the Pillsbury rolls in a can, and that's fine, I don't judge, but for the man-panion & I's first Christmas as a married couple, I decided I wanted to try from-scratch cinnamon rolls for breakfast.

(Then I woke up Christmas morning and realized I was out of flour, so we had cereal and I made Boxing Day cinnamon rolls instead. But no matter, they were still tasty.)

I started out where so many of my culinary adventures start, in the Red Plaid Cookbook. It yielded a fairly straightforward recipe for cinnamon rolls, which I followed pretty closely, with the exception of halving it and omitting the raisins (raisins are delicious, and they belong in many baked goods, but not cinnamon rolls).

If you've never made any sort of yeast bread before, it might seem a little intimidating, but I promise, it's not. It helps to have an electric mixer with a dough hook...

Not least of all so you can play pirates in the kitchen.

...but with only slightly more effort, you can make these suckers by hand, and it's still totally worth it.

Winter Comfort Food: Roasted Brussel Sprout & Chicken Sausage Pasta

It's no secret that I love the resource that is Pintrest. I can scroll through the foodies' delight corner when I'm bored, tag the dishes that look tastiest, and make them later when I'm in need of a new meal to shake things up. The best part is, it's gotten me to try things that I never ate growing up.

Like brussell sprouts.

There are certain things I just never ate as a kid, given my mum's aversion to them. Beets, any kind of seafood (at least at home. Like father like daughter, I would always eat fish when we went out to restaurants!), and most definitely brussell sprouts. But I've heard such good things about them, usually along the vein of, "Oh, you just haven't had them MADE the right way! Have you tried roasting them?"

So when I found Cait's Plate's recipe for Roasted Brussell Sprouts & Chicken Sausage Pasta, I thought I would give it a try! Zac and I would be in big trouble if either of us gave up gluten - pasta is definitely our go-to answer for "what should we have for dinner?" That being said, we both have the bad habit of calling a bowl of pasta with obscene amounts of cheese/butter/garlic oil/etc "dinner." While it's certainly hella tasty, it doesn't rank too high on the "did I eat my veggies today?" scale.

I think my favorite part about this recipe is how few ingredients it requires. I'm not a big fan of giant shopping lists...inevitably, I will forget that one item. And then I kick myself all the way back to the grocery store...which is no fun on your bike in Chicago winters! Anywho, this dish requires 5 whole ingredients.

Ends & Bits: Little House-Inspired Bean Soup

Refrigerator empty? Cupboards bare? Need to stretch the wilty remains of last week’s grocery run until next payday? Toss all those little ends and bits in a pan and make something delicious! This series explores the skill set of just “throwing together” a meal by looking at what you have available to work with and going from there. This takes a willingness to experiment and a bit of a knack for knowing what will taste delicious together. It also helps to have plenty of practice and exposure to a wide varieties of recipes with potential variations. It is in this spirit that we run our regular Ends & Bits series.

Hi, my name is Andrea and I'm obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie series. I own all the books and two complete spinoff series; I've been marathon-ing the show on DVD from the library; I even own the goddamn cookbook.

I have literally read this cover-to-cover.

I tend to re-read the original series just about once a year, and so a couple days ago, I finished The Long Winter for the umpteenth time, in which the whole town is snowed in for like 7 months straight and the trains stop running and everybody pretty much almost starves. But early on in the book, it talks about how Ma makes bean soup and how very tasty and warming it is when it's so very cold outside.

Meanwhile, back in real life, for various reasons, the darling husband and I are trying to see if we can make it until next week without going grocery shopping, which means we're digging into the bottoms of the cabinets and fridge to use all the stuff we've been pushing aside because there were other, easier things to cook. And yesterday, I found half a bag of dried beans that have probably been in the cabinet for over a year, and it all clicked: I would follow the example of Ma Ingalls, make do with what we have, and whip up some tasty bean soup.

This recipe is not directly from the Little House Cookbook, mostly because they had rather less on hand than I do and their bean soup would have been pretty terribly bland, and also because I don't have salt pork. (Is that even a thing anymore?) Rather, it is simply bean-based and inspired by the use-up-and-make-do-with-what-you-have attitude so often found in the Little House series.

Spoiler: 2014 Is Pretty Great!

Happy New Year from this side of the international date line! Thank you everyone for your support and contributions as we got this project off the ground this year. Looking forward to a wonderful 2014 full of lots of delicious food and fun collaboration. Check back later today for a delicious traditional New Year's Day meal from Andrea.

Here's to hoping everyone has a wonderful and safe time ushering in the new year.

Sydney wishes you a happy NYE, too!