Autumn Stew/Roasted Squash Seeds

I believe I have mentioned before my love affair with winter squashes; I also shared a recipe that requires a partial can of pumpkin. In furtherance of my addiction to squash (and to give you something to do with the rest of that can of pumpkin), I concocted a stew that is, as far as I'm concerned, the season of autumn, condensed into one Crock Pot full of autumnal goodness. (I've done this before, with slightly different results; if you're curious, you can check out the post on my personal blog that I haven't updated in like a year now. This one is more creamy and less sweet, but they're definitely related.)

To start, gather every autumn-y food thing you can find, plus some other stuff:

The main things here are the butternut squash, sweet potatoes, apples, and sausage. But the other stuff's important, too.

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!

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.

Modification Monday: In Search of Fond Memories

You know when you start with one recipe and then end up with something totally different? Or start with a vision in your head they you can’t find a recipe for, so you find 3 or 4 recipes that are sort of similar and awkwardly mash them together, with a bit of your own flare? Or have to adapt well-loved favorites to new dietary restrictions? Or look at old stand-bys and think: “This should totally have bacon. Or tomatoes. Or bourbon.”? Yeah, the Modification Mondays series is for you. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to follow our recipes either.

So I love Italian wedding soup. Specifically I love Knox’s* version of Italian wedding soup, which I’m sure is nothing special. It probably comes out of a can, but I love it so much. Italian wedding soup days meant nothing but Italian wedding soup, didn’t matter what was on the dessert bar; nothing would adulterate that delicious soup. Well maybe I exaggerate a little bit, but I usually had two bowls so that didn’t leave a lot of room for anything else. So I was pretty excited to find this in my Crockpot cookbook.

*Knox is a college.

Fancy Foodie Friday: Thyme Steak with Lemon Ginger Potatoes and Carrots

Feel like a treat after a long week? Splurge on a special ingredient? In the mood to spend a little longer in the kitchen? Got a hot date to impress with your culinary prowess? Check out the recipes in our ongoing Fancy Foodie Fridays series. These recipes might be a little too complex, time-consuming, or expensive for the every day, but are a nice challenge or treat for a fancy evening in. This is the second installment in the series.

It took a fun, creative sous chef to turn an eat-to-live girl into a food lover. I told my boyfriend Doug about this project, and he was instantly ready to create a delicious dish. Honestly, anytime we take the time to make dinner, it's amazing. The first bite is always an explosion of tastiness that makes me instantly happy and more in love.

This meal is no exception.

This dish presented some new flavor combinations that I personally never tasted before. The carrots are interesting in that they have the vinegar flavor, but not the bite. After the honey is added, the finished product has such a unique flavor that you'll either really enjoy it or not like it at all. The lemon ginger coconut oil that he's been cooking with is a perfect harmony of lemon, ginger, and coconut. We've even thrown it in when cooking rice, and it makes it 10x tastier.

Recipe, cooking, and cooking terms brought to you by Doug Sprous, Sous Chef (my main inspiration to expand my palate and learn how to cook properly).

Apple-y Goodness: Apple Cider Baked Chicken

I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

I.

LOVE.

Apples.

I think part of it stems (yes, pun intended) from growing up in Upstate New York. We lived a half mile from an apple orchard; every fall, my folks would take me and my brother apple picking. Homemade applesauce was mum’s specialty - and it was PINK, which makes it all the better. Having moved to the midwest, I realized I’m extraordinarily picky about my apples...and I can’t get a good macintosh apple (insert obligatory computer joke here) out here to save my life.

Needless to say, when Zac and I were surfing through my pintrest board of “ooh, that looks tasty and I want to try that sometime” recipes and his eyes lit on the Apple Cider Baked Chicken, I was more than ready to write the grocery list!

And it’s a pretty simple grocery list at that. Some chicken legs, potatoes, onions, lemons, apples, apple cider, and mushrooms, plus some pantry staples like olive oil and salt and pepper and bay leaves. All in all, it’s a pretty inexpensive and uncomplicated grocery list, requirements for just about any recipe I’m going to try!

The only tricky bit to this recipe is the planning ahead component. For all that I love planning ahead when it comes to Things I’m Doing and People I’m Hanging Out With, Zac and I are reeeeeeally terrible at forseeing anything beyond “what am I hungry for right now?”

Fortunately, the only planning ahead this recipe calls for is measuring and dumping things into a giant ziplock bag! The night before (or in our case, the morning of) you just gotta put the onion, lemons, apple cider, olive oil, thyme, apple cider vinegar, mustard, garlic, bay leaves, salt, pepper and chicken legs in the ziplock bag and let it marinate till it’s time to cook.

What’s nice is that once you’ve done that work in the morning, all that’s left to do when you’re actually cooking is chop up the potatoes and apples (and mushrooms if you want to add those to the recipe!), dump everything in a cast iron skillet or casserole dish and stick it in the oven for an hour and change.

And then you get this sort of tasty deliciousness that is full of apple-y goodness:

And since we had more cider than the recipe called for, of COURSE our drink for the night was apple cider spiked with honey whiskey!

So here you go! Next time you’ve got a hankering for something delicious with apples and cider, we’ve got you covered :)

Fancy Foodie Friday: Roasted Cauliflower, Sirloin Tip Roast, and Caramelized Onion Pasta

Feel like a treat after a long week? Splurge on a special ingredient? In the mood to spend a little longer in the kitchen? Got a hot date to impress with your culinary prowess? Check out the recipes in our ongoing Fancy Foodie Fridays series. These recipes might be a little too complex, time-consuming, or expensive for the every day, but are a nice challenge or treat for a fancy evening in. This is the first post in the series.


I’m a big fan of cooler weather. Many of the things I like best in life (soup, hot tea, fuzzy blankets, fuzzy socks, a lit fireplace, etc.) are best-suited to cooler weather. It’s also the perfect time of year for roasting. I live in Buffalo, NY, and this week is the first week it’s gotten nice and cold, so I’m celebrating by turning on the oven!

Roasting is my favorite way to prepare vegetables. It’s well-suited to my favorite veggies, which tend be the roots—cauliflower, potatoes, carrots, parsnips—but I’ve also found it works well for things like broccoli and asparagus. Asparagus especially gets these delicious crispy tips and turns very nutty in taste. Denser veggies like carrots or rutabagas take longer.