Category Archives: Recipes

More Thoughts on Hummus

Like I mentioned in my last post, hummus is one of those versatile recipes that can be used a dozen different ways. When I made the batch for the Request for Hummus post, I wanted to use the hummus for more than just a meze (a Turkish or Greek… why does it make me nervous to type both of those names back to back… dip or snack food), but as a part of a larger meal. What came to mind was a sandwich that I’d fiddled with before, but hadn’t yet perfected. What it needed was a silky layer of hummus to really pull all the flavors together, and voila, the Mediterranean Tuna and Hummus Sandwich was created. You’re really going to like this one.

The sandwich has three main components, the flat bread, the hummus and a Mediterranean-style Tuna Salad. The flat bread could be bought from your local store, or substituted out for a nice crusty roll, OR you could use some of the fantastic Whole Wheat Pizza Dough that I wrote about for stocking your pantry. As I’ll describe below (or click here for a “how to” recipe for Using Frozen Pizza Dough), you simply roll out the dough, season it with whatever dried herb mixture you prefer, and bake it until crispy. It’s delicious! The hummus, while you could buy it from the store, is so easy to make at home that once you get this recipe (Marie’s Hummus) down you’ll never look at the pasty stuff from the grocery store in the same way again. The last part, the Mediterranean-style Tuna Salad, is included here. If you’re not a big fan of the traditional mayonnaise-based tuna salad, this one is for you.

While I actually am a fan of a good, rich, mayonnaise-based tuna salad sandwich (in fact I think that’s what we’re having for dinner tonight) there are times when I want something a bit different, and that’s when I use this Mediterranean-style Tuna Salad recipe. It has a nice, briney bite from kalamata olives, a little feta cheese gives it a creamy-richness, and there’s plenty of crunch from vegetables like onion and celery. In fact, you’ll be surprised by how much salad one little can of tuna can create since it is well supported by a crunchy cast of characters. The salad is a cinch to toss together, the flavors get better if they have a chance to hang out for a bit, and it’s great to serve over lettuce for a large salad, or you can serve it with crackers for a snack or appetizer, OR even better you can serve it as a part of a great, layered open face sandwich like the one shown here.

Mediterranean-Style Tuna Salad

Ingredients:
3 eggs, hard boiled and separated
1 can tuna in water, drained
2 sticks of celery, finely diced
¼ cup feta, crumbled
¼ cup kalamata olives, pitted and diced
1 cup English or hot house cucumber, diced
½ small onion, diced
¼ cup olive oil
1 tbsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. herbs de Provence, or other dry herb blend
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Separate the egg whites from the yolk, and discard two yolks. That is where most of the fat and cholesterol reside. Use them if you want, the salad will be even more delicious. I discard them here to lighten the salad. Finely dice the remaining yolk and whites. Add them to a large bowl.
Add the tuna, celery, feta, olives, cucumber and onions to the bowl and toss to combine.
The salad ingredients.

Tossed to combine
Whisk the olive oil, lemon juice, herbs, salt and pepper in a small bowl to combine.
Toss the salad with the dressing and enjoy!

Click here for a printable Mediterranean Tuna Salad recipe.

Mediterranean-Style Tuna and Hummus Sandwich

Ingredients:

One portion Whole Wheat Pizza Dough
1 cup Marie’s Hummus
1 batch Mediterranean Tuna Salad
1 tsp. Herbs de Provence blend
1 cup salad greens or arugula
Olive oil to taste

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350º.
Roll out the dough into a wide oval, about ¼ inch thick. With a fork (or docking tool) poke holes all over the surface of the dough. This will keep it from bubbling up and distorting. Brush the dough lightly with about 1 tsp. of olive oil. Sprinkle a pinch of salt and the Herbs de Provence over the dough. Either slide the dough directly onto a pizza stone in your hot oven, or place it on a parchment paper lined baking sheet and then into the hot oven. Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until just browned in spots. Remove the crust to your work area.
The prepared dough for flat bread.

Note that the shape of the dough changed significantly. 🙂 This is what makes it “rustic”… When things don’t go as planned just call them “rustic” and they’ll still taste as good.
Spread the hummus in a thin layer over most of your crust, leaving a 1 inch border around the edges.
Leave a thin border around the edges for a good place to hold onto your open faced sandwich.
Mound the Mediterranean Tuna Salad on top of the hummus, leaving a narrow border around the edges so that the hummus is visible.
Each added “layer” should leave a little of the previous layer visible so you can see a bit of everything.
Mound your salad greens or arugula on top of the tuna salad and drizzle it lightly with olive oil.
I used hearts of romaine here for the last layer, but my favorite is arugula. Water cress would be great too!
Cut into “slices” and serve. Enjoy!

Click here for a printable Mediterranean Style Tuna and Hummus Sandwich recipe.

If you want to find an easy “recipe” for using your frozen from scratch pizza dough, click here: Using Frozen Pizza Dough.

One delicious open face sandwich. You can make smaller sized ones for individual portions if you want to be fancy, or make one large one like this and cut it into quarters or long slices to serve family style.

A Request for Hummus

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One of the best parts of this blog has been reading and replying to comments from readers; and most recently receiving requests for recipes from friends. Cooking is a way that I connect with people. It’s something that I can do as a gift, or as a way to build a friendship, or to show love to friends and family. Often when I am cooking for someone, I am also thinking about that person while I’m chopping the onions and garlic, stirring the veg in the pan, or tasting for final seasoning. It makes cooking more than just putting ingredients together for a meal, but it gives me time to also think about the person or people that I’m cooking for. Its’ an act of love, not just of eating. So when friends request recipes from me I take it as the highest compliment.

It is therefore a great joy that in a couple of upcoming posts I will be sharing a couple of recipes requested from friends who are distant in geography but close in my thoughts. The first recipe I’ll be sharing is for hummus. Hummus is one of those foods that is super simple to make, irks me to buy premade, and is incredibly personal in how you prepare it. The two greatest influences for me in my hummus was the first time I was taught to make it in Beirut, as well as from my experiences in Turkey. In Beirut, the friend who taught me to make it created an amazingly herbaceous version, speckled throughout with finely chopped parsley. In Turkey I was most influenced by our amazing excavation chef, Necmi, who guarded his culinary secrets dearly, but whose hummus was incredibly silky and redolent with garlic and tahini.

Then there was Iowa… Not a statement that normally follows a genealogy of hummus. But it was in Iowa that I was able to expand my initial anthropology of food course into a series of courses, spanning food production and politics; to the cultural expressions of food and identity. It didn’t make sense to me to teach a course on food and not get to taste or prepare food to share in class. So for those classes, especially, I tried to make sure that I brought food to share with my students, and in a couple of cases (some more successful than others) to make food with the class on campus.

One of the most successful cases of this was with my Food Politics class when we spent one class meeting in the college kitchens making ricotta cheese and pizza dough for our own white pizzas. This isn’t just a “fluff” exercise, but it takes the intellectual side of talking about a subject and makes it real by actually touching, preparing, sharing and eating food together.

For this particular class it happened that I had a couple of students who were lactose intolerant and I didn’t want to leave them out. So I started thinking of the bare pizza dough, fired in the oven, what would go well with it? Hummus… Make the pizza dough into a spiced flat bread, serve it with the freshly prepared hummus and you’ve got a rock star food to share. So that’s what we did; made pizza bianca with the homemade dough and ricotta, as well as a meze of hummus and flat bread. I was greatly impacted by many of the students from that class, and it’s been great to keep in touch with them as they graduated (or will soon!) from college and we’ve moved up north. This recipe was requested by one of those students, but she and her friend were inseparable and therefore I can’t bring myself to dedicate this hummus to one without the “other” (anthro humor there… sorry…). Chelsea and Becca, this is for you ladies.

As you will see with this recipe, basic hummus is a great blank canvas for a myriad of flavors. I’ve added smoked paprika for a little Spanish flare, spinach for some extra greenery in a form that my son will eat (sometimes), or roasted red bell pepper for a different savory taste. The sky (and your imagination) are the limit here, so feel free to whip up a batch and personalize it to your tastes.

I like to serve hummus in a shallow bowl, with a depression at the top to hold a little golden olive oil, and a sprinkling of paprika over top.

Hummus

Ingredients:

2 garlic clove (or more to taste)
2 (15 oz) cans of chickpeas, rinsed and drained
3-4 Tbsp. tahini (sesame seed) paste
3-4 tsp. lemon juice
2 tsp. ground cumin
2 tsp. ground coriander
2 tsp. salt
Approximately ½ cup olive oil

Directions:

Drop the garlic one clove at a time into a running food processor through the feed tube. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as necessary.
Dropping garlic into the feed tube.

Scrape down the sides of the bowl so you don’t lose any of that garlicky goodness.
Add the rest of the ingredients except for the olive oil and pulse until the ingredients are mixed but still a bit rough.
A rough mix of ingredients.
Then turn the processor on and through the tube slowly pour in the olive oil in a thin, steady stream until you get the desired creamy consistency.
A smooth, creamy hummus.
Taste and adjust for seasoning. Blend the hummus again. Taste. Blend. Enjoy!

Click here for a printable version of Marie’s Hummus recipe.

A perfect dish for sliced flatbread, fresh veges, or even as a “sauce” for sandwiches.

Stocking the Pantry 2: The Bread Edition

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After publishing his seminal work entitled An Eater’s Manifesto in which he lays out many concerns over the modern production of food, Michael Pollan found himself deluged with questions regarding what was actually safe (or good) to eat. His response was In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto where he writes that we should “eat food, not too much, and mostly greens.” Sounds simple enough, except for the fact that what many of us consider to be “food” are actually highly processed, food-like products. To specify what he meant by “food,” Pollan wrote that it should be recognizable by our grandmothers (or great-grandmothers) as “food,” even when we read the ingredient list. In short, you shouldn’t need a Ph.D. in Nutritional Science to understand the contents of what you are going to eat. Pollan’s iconic example of this is the ingredient list from a brand name “bread” product that had an astounding 20 ingredients when bread truly only needs four; flour, yeast, water and salt.

It was through readings such as Pollan’s that I realized I really didn’t know how a lot of the basic foodstuffs were made. Don’t get me wrong I knew what was in some of these things, but I didn’t know how to go about making them for myself. I had the theory, but not the practice. Much of my cooking before that time had been focused on either making really fancy food or really quick food. There were the fancy meals for friends where I tried out new ideas and tastes that until that time I’d only read about, and then there were the weeknight meals as a young married couple trying to balance graduate school and life. The basic foodstuffs, the types of things that I liked to keep in my pantry like spaghetti sauce, pizza dough, even muffins, were things that I only bought in packaged form and hadn’t really thought about making them at home.

Around the same time of Little Man’s arrival I had started teaching anthropology of food courses at the university where I taught. The research I was doing for my courses, as well as our desire to feed our family well, led me to start tinkering with making some of these basics, like pizza dough and soup stock. Now these things are so basic for me to make that it irks me if I run out and have to buy them from the store. The basic food that I’ve recently added to my repertoire to make at home is whole wheat bread.

Now before you get nervous and start mentally listing off all the ways that you live a super busy life and can’t possibly fit making your own bread into an already crazy schedule, don’t panic. Take a deep breath. This recipe is a fun Saturday afternoon project and makes enough dough for you to make three loaves of bread, two of which can hang out in the freezer until you are ready to eat them. That is the beauty of stocking your pantry; you make things periodically in bulk, freeze them, and then use them as you want them over the following weeks or months. You can choose what types of staples you would like to have at hand, and make them at home. And for all of these basic foods, like pizza dough, bread, tomato sauce, etc., there is something immensely satisfying knowing that not only do you know the entire ingredient list, but you actually made these things. They weren’t made in a factory by extruders and people garbed in sci-fi plastic clothing, but these foods were made by you, with your own hands (and your kids’ hands), and that makes it all taste that much better. Have fun!

Whole Wheat Oat Bread

Adapted from: Girl Versus Dough

Ingredients:
2 cups water
2 cups milk
4 ½ tsp. (2 packets) active dry yeast
3 tbsp. agave
4 cups whole wheat flour
5 cups whole wheat bread flour
2 cup rolled oats (not instant)
½ cup olive oil
2 tbsp. salt

Directions:

Combine half of the milk and water in a microwave safe bowl and heat for 45 seconds or until very warm (not more than 115ºF). Pour this into the bowl of a stand mixer (or mixing bowl) and add half of the yeast and agave. Stir to combine and let rest for 10 minutes or until foamy.
Adding the yeast to the milk mixture in the stand mixer.

The yeast starting to proof and get foamy.

The rest of the dry ingredients.
Add half of the flours, oats, olive oil and salt to the bowl and mix/stir to combine. Once the ingredients are incorporated, mix at Speed 2 on your stand mixer for 6 minutes. If kneading by hand, dump ingredients out onto a lightly floured board and knead until smooth and elastic (about 15 minutes).
The mixture just getting fully incorporated and starting to pull away from the sides of the bowl.

The cohesive dough has been “kneaded” by the machine and is ready to proof.
Oil a large bowl for the dough to rise in. Place the dough into the bowl, cover loosely with plastic wrap and set aside.
The first batch of dough resting in a proofing bowl.
Repeat the previous instructions with the remaining ingredients. Once the second batch of dough is completed, add it to the first. Roll the dough quickly in the oiled bowl so that all sides are slicked. Cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and then with a towel. Place the dough in a warm place to rise until doubled, about 1 hour.
The second batch of dough has been added to the first and set in the bowl to rest.

Covering the dough with plastic wrap.

Tucking the dough in with a towel.

A big, beautiful bowl of proofed dough.
Gently press down on the dough to release some of the gases. Let it sit for 10 minutes.
There’s no need to brutalize your dough by “punching” it down. Just give it a nice press to release some of the gasses, then let it rest for a bit before proceeding.
Divide the dough into three pieces. On a lightly floured board shape one piece of dough into a roughly 8×6 inch rectangle. Tightly roll the rectangle into a long cylinder, tucking the ends in as you go. Seal the cylinder along its base so that no seams are visible. Set the cylinder aside and repeat this step with the remaining two pieces of dough.
Form the individual pieces of dough into rough rectangles.

Then roll the rectangles into tight cylinders, tucking in the edges as you go.
To bake immediately: Place each piece of dough into its own oiled loaf pan. Cover the pan(s) loosely with plastic wrap and a towel. Set the pan(s) aside to let the dough rise for about 45 minutes. The dough should be more or less the shape of the finished loaf. Proceed to baking instructions.
If you want to bake a loaf immediately, place the formed cylinder into a well oiled bread pan.

Cover the prepared dough with plastic wrap and its towel, then set it aside to proof again.

This dough is proofed and ready for the oven.
To freeze for future use: Place each piece of dough into its own large, resealable plastic bag. Seal the bag and place it in the freezer. The dough can be frozen for 2-3 months. Remove the dough from the freezer and thaw in a well-buttered loaf pan, then proceed to baking instructions.
Any dough that you want to save can be tightly wrapped in plastic and then sealed in a plastic bag and frozen. This dough will last in the freezer for 2-3 months.
Baking Instructions: Preheat your oven to 400ºF. Bake the bread for 40-50 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through baking. The bread is done when dark brown on top and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom, or has reached an internal temperature of 190ºF. Cool on wire racks and enjoy!

	Whole Wheat Oatmeal Bread http://www.thesheepareout.com adapted from: Girl Versus Dough
Ingredients: 2 cups water 2 cups milk4 ½ tsp. (2 packets) active dry yeast 3 tbsp. agave 4 cups whole wheat flour 5 cups whole wheat bread flour 2 cup rolled oats (not instant) ½ cup olive oil 2 tbsp. salt
Directions: Combine half of the milk and water in a microwave safe bowl and heat for 45 seconds or until very warm (not more than 115ºF). Pour this into the bowl of a stand mixer (or mixing bowl) and add half of the yeast and agave. Stir to combine and let rest for 10 minutes or until foamy. Add half of the flours, oats, olive oil and salt to the bowl and mix/stir to combine. Once the ingredients are incorporated, mix at Speed 2 on your stand mixer for 6 minutes. If kneading by hand, dump ingredients out onto a lightly floured board and knead until smooth and elastic (about 15 minutes). Oil a large bowl for the dough to rise in. Place the dough into the bowl, cover loosely with plastic wrap and set aside. Repeat the previous instructions with the remaining ingredients. Once the second batch of dough is completed, add it to the first, and shape the dough into a tight ball. Roll the dough quickly in the oiled bowl so that all sides are slicked. Cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and then with a towel. Place the dough in a warm place to rise until doubled, about 1 hour. Gently press down on the dough to release some of the gases. Let it sit for 10 minutes. Divide the dough into three pieces. On a lightly floured board shape one piece of dough into a roughly 8×6 inch rectangle. Tightly roll the rectangle into a long cylinder, tucking the ends in as you go. Seal the cylinder along its base so that no seams are visible. Set the cylinder aside and repeat this step with the remaining two pieces of dough. To bake immediately: Place each piece of dough into its own oiled loaf pan. Cover the pan(s) loosely with plastic wrap and a towel. Set the pan(s) aside to let the dough rise for about 45 minutes. The dough should be more or less the shape of the finished loaf. Proceed to baking instructions. To freeze for future use: Place each piece of dough into its own large, resealable plastic bag. Seal the bag and place it in the freezer. The dough can be frozen for 2-3 months. Remove the dough from the freezer and thaw in a well-buttered loaf pan, then proceed to baking instructions. Baking Instructions: Preheat your oven to 400ºF. Bake the bread for 40-50 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through baking. The bread is done when dark brown on top and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom, or has reached an internal temperature of 190ºF. Cool on wire racks and enjoy!

Click here for a printable version of the Whole Wheat Oat Bread recipe.

I woke up to the snow…

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I woke up to the snow, but didn’t really give it much attention (other than groaning at the delay of Spring) until I tried to step outside for a quick jaunt to visit “the ladies” to gather some eggs. I say that I “tried” to step outside since at first I couldn’t tell where the steps up from our basement were. The three squat steps from our basement door to the driveway had been reduced to a fluffy hill of snow, with no indication of where each individual step might be. I stood there for a moment, confused, as if trying to remember what the landscape was supposed to look like. In my defense I hadn’t had any coffee yet, and my only goal was to get the eggs quickly so that I could make breakfast in time for the gold medal men’s hockey game between Canada and Sweden.

So I girded myself, clutched my egg basket tightly, and plunged outside into what I hoped was the path to the hen house. I more or less found the stairs and with my sorely abused pink Uggs, plowed my way up the low rise. With each step my boots disappeared into the 2+ feet deep drifts, and with each step some snow made its way into my boots. Who needs coffee, a little snow inside your sockless boots will get you going in the morning. Snow hat flopping. Egg basket dangling. Balance swerving with each step into where I hoped the path to the chicken house lay. I was a picture of beauty and grace, and hopefully I was the only witness to my progress.

My poor, abused boots disappearing into the snow they were not designed to handle.

Once I retrieved the eggs, I realized that I hadn’t considered the difficulties of returning to the house through the deep snow with a basket full of eggs. Luckily both the eggs and I returned to the house unscathed, if a bit frozen around the edges. With the eggs secured for breakfast I put together a “fancy” version of Eggs-in-a-Hole. In the spirit of the gold medal game I used a maple leaf cookie cutter to cut the Canadian symbol into our toast. Little Man got the more traditional torn out hole for his toast to accommodate his Scrambled-Eggs-in-a-Hole.

A fancy version of Eggs-in-a-Hole in honor of the Canadian men’s gold medal hockey game against Sweden.

Alas my yolk broke for this picture, but in my defense my fingers were still frozen and I really wanted to get the food served so I could watch the game. Little Man’s toast was torn to accommodate the volume of his Scrambled-Eggs-in-a-Hole.

My well-intentioned ode to Canadian hockey.

After breakfast and with two gold medals in hockey for Canada we donned whatever snow-sort-of gear that we had (we are still woefully under equipped for weather) and ventured outside. The snow came up to Little Man’s hips, and he was not impressed until we got him out onto the “sort of plowed” road where he could run and move more easily.

The snow came up to Little Man’s waist, yet his dad doesn’t seem to mind.

Trucking down the “sort of plowed” road.

Hoops, anyone?

When we couldn’t take the cold anymore, we retreated back to the house. Little Man had a well deserved warm bath, and then we all were treated to steaming mugs of Auntie Erin’s Hot Cocoa. The past present to ourselves on our Big Snow Day was an afternoon nap. Bodies tired out from playing in the snow. Bellies warm and filled with cocoa. Toddler snoozing in the other room, and us sprawled gracelessly across the bed. It was heaven.

A fairytale wilderness

Birthday Party Food for Kiddos… and Their Very Patient Parents

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We are still relative newbies to the world of children’s birthday parties, and the terror that can be instilled in the heart of a parent when s/he sees a precious child return from a friend’s party with a goodie bag so chock full of candy that it rivals Halloween. I cannot speak to how other people’s children act (well… actually I could, but that isn’t polite) when hopped up on that level of sugar and pizza-party junk food, but I can attest to how my lovely, precocious little boy turns into a whirlwind of high pitched cackles and rule breaking that I can only describe as temporary insanity for all involved. As fellow parents, shouldn’t we want to set our own children, as well as their friends and parents, up for success?

I’m not suggesting that all birthday party food must be reduced to carrots and hummus (although that would be tasty!), but we can create amazing birthdays while still feeding people well… and inexpensively. The food that I include here isn’t necessarily healthy. This is celebration food, not something that you would include in your diet or eat on a daily basis. Nor is it filled with preservatives or the nearly obscene amounts of sugar found in processed foods. These are all dishes that can be made a couple days (or more) in advance so that the day of the party can be spent enjoying the birthday boy or girl, not panicking over the stove (I’ve been there too). So let’s have a party, and not feel sick to our stomachs by the end of the feast.

The foods and drink that I am posting here are actually the same recipes that we’ve used for all of Little Man’s birthday parties so far and many of the recipes are not my own. For those dishes I’ve included the links to the original sites, so all you have to do is click on the dish’s highlighted name and a window will open with that recipe from its original site. It’s unlike me to recycle exact menus like this for recurring celebrations, but we’re still finding our way in how to throw great kid parties. I wanted recipes that I knew would turn out great, that could be done in advance, and that wouldn’t break our bank account or my spirit to prepare. I might break out and try something different next year, but then again if it isn’t broken…

So here’s the menu:

Rainbow Fruit Platter
Jungle Juice Punch
Amazing Mac n Cheese
Zebra Cake
Snacks and Goodie Bags

Rainbow Fruit Platter

Rainbow Fruit Platter served on a rectangular bamboo cutting board.

One of the most commonly re-pinned items from my Pintrest boards is this Rainbow Fruit Platter. The original site I pinned it from does not exist any more, but similar images have popped up across the internet. I don’t know what it is about this simple dish (maybe the avoidance of the tasteless cantaloupe and honeydew melon that so often “graces” fruit plates), but every time I serve this at a child’s party it gets eaten up faster than anything else. For best results, use fresh fruit. It seems silly to state this for a fruit platter, but having lived in places where during the winter months you sit back and watch the price of fresh produce skyrocket it can be tempting to go for frozen. To put it mildly, the texture would be a bummer. It doesn’t matter what shape platter you use for this, I’ve used both rectangular (above) and circular (below). Just be sure to give enough room for each color arc to be well represented.

Rainbow Fruit Platter (and Pooh Bear) at the party in 2012.

Rainbow Fruit Platter (and Pooh Bear) served on a circular metal platter.

You can use any combination of your favorite fruits, but here are the ones that I keep coming back to both for their great colors and taste.

Rainbow Fruit Platter

Ingredients

Red: Sliced Strawberries and fresh Raspberries

Orange: Mandarin Oranges, peeled and divided into segments

Yellow: Pineapple, peeled and cut into bite-size pieces

Green: Green Grapes, halved

Blue/Indigo: Blueberries and/or Blackberries

Directions:

Find a large serving platter and set it near your work station. Depending on the platter’s material, you may want to cover it with plastic wrap before putting the fruit down.
Prepare the different fruits and set them aside in individual bowls.
Begin with the red (and largest) arc of your rainbow, and arrange the strawberries on the platter.
Then fill in each succeeding arc with your chosen fruit. You may need to adjust the size of your arcs as you go.
Add the most delicate fruits, like the raspberries and blackberries (if using) last.
Once the platter is complete, roll up a small paper towel and place it in the void between the blueberries or blackberries to preserve the arc’s shape.
Cover the platter loosely with plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator until the party. You can do this the night before, but I don’t suggest doing this too early since the texture of the cut fruit can get mushy.

Click here for a printable version of the Rainbow Fruit Platter recipe.

Jungle Juice Punch

Finding a drink that is both suitable for kids and enjoyed by adults can be tricky at parties. For my part, I don’t allow Little Man to drink pop (or soda for those south of the border) or any of those popular punches made out of flavor packets that are little more than sugar and food coloring. Instead I use one of the iced tea and fruit juice-based punches published by Giada De Laurentis on the Food Network website. For kid-based parties my favorite is Giada’s Apple Mint Punch, which I call “Jungle Juice” for the parties because of its golden green color. I make a double or triple batch and serve it in a large bee-hive shaped glass beverage carafe. In Giada’s recipe she makes simple syrup with fresh mint as the sweetener. It pains me to pay for fresh mint in the store (especially in winter), so I often use dried mint. If you use dried herbs, just use half the quantity that the recipe specifies. Dried herbs are much stronger than the fresh, so you don’t need quite as much. If you are making this when your garden or local farmers market is full of fresh herbs, use whatever mixture of herbs you like best. My favorite version of this was actually from last summer when my mint had been severely hacked back in a fit of mojito making, so instead I used fresh basil and tarragon. The punch was delicious!

Amazing Mac n Cheese

Since Little Man still takes naps, I like to have his parties in the morning so that things are breaking up right around the time for him (and his friends) to settle down for nap time. That means that I want the kiddos and their parents to have something good for lunch, so that they have energy to play, none of us are feeling sick from too much junk food, and the kids can leave feeling happy not completely pooped and grouchy from sugar crash. My favorite dish for this is an amazing Mac n Cheese from the Pioneer Woman (aka Ree Drummond) also on Food Network. I make a double batch of this in the morning, pile it into my largest lasagna pan and set it aside until I’m just about ready to serve lunch. Then I top it liberally with grated, sharp cheddar cheese and broil the top until its melted and golden brown. I’ve also made this the night before and reheated it for a party the next day. Just be sure to give yourself ample time to rewarm the casserole in the oven, and hold off on adding the cheesy topping until you are just about ready to serve. Every time I serve this I have parents’ asking me for the recipe. Now you have it!

Zebra Cake

Of course I forgot to take a picture of the inside of the cake, but if you want to see the cool, zebra-print pattern check out the link that follows with the cake’s name. The first time I can across Zebra Cake was from the DIY Queen website. The original post consists just of cool pictures of the process, but I found a number of other sites where the process is described in greater detail. Check out Fae’s Twist & Tango for a great example with detailed explanation of the steps and sample cake recipes. It’s astoundingly simple, and gravity does much of the work for you. Simply choose your favorite white cake and chocolate cake recipes (or box mixes) and prepare the batters. The batters need to be of pourable consistency, so if they are too thick you might need to thin them out a little. Then you start by pouring a small scoop (about 1/3 of a cup) of the white batter in the middle of your prepared (butter and parchment paper) cake pan. Then add a similarly sized scoop of the chocolate batter, and repeat. Try to save the last scoop for the chocolate batter. With each scoop, gravity will slowly push the other rings out towards the edges of the pan. Then bake, cool and decorate as you would like. Little Man’s party was animal-themed (hence the cake I chose), so we used a delicious chocolate frosting, simple candles, and a ring of non-toxic plastic animals for decoration. Once the candles were blown out each child (birthday boy first) got to choose an animal to add to their goodie bag.

Snacks and Goodie Bags

Beyond the Rainbow Fruit Platter and the Mac n Cheese, I like to keep the rest of the offerings simple. For this birthday, Little Man’s sole request for food at his party was for Cheezies, a Canadian cheese-puff that is similar to the American Cheetos. One word of advice, don’t start a discussion with a Canadian about which brand is better. They are very passionate about their Cheezies… So to honor Little Man’s one birthday request, and to celebrate our new Canadian home, a good sized bowl of Cheezies appeared next to the Mac n Cheese casserole at his party.

Little Man’s sole request for food at his party was Cheezies.

The Goodie Bags for Little Man’s party were relatively simple in that there wasn’t a ton of stuff, and we tried to keep sugar to a minimum. Each child got a small bag (gotta love the dollar stores) with their name in puffy paint. Inside each bag was an animal foam magnate kit to do at home another time. Then we’d also gotten animal-themed stickers and handed those out after the kids did a great dance party. Each child also got a handmade animal mask (see next week’s post for more information on those), and two stacks of miniature homemade cookies (Chocolate Chip and Oatmeal Raisin). We wanted the bags to be fun and special, but not filled with candy or expensive to make/buy. They were also fun for me to work on over the week prior to Little Man’s Party.

A tray filled with the Goodie Bags and things to go in them.

On the whole, I think the party was a success. For the next week Little Man kept asking to have his friends over for another dance party. The streamers finally came down, and now we’re settling in to these new adventures with a little boy who is one more year older. It’s fun to day dream about the new adventures we’ll have together over this next year… and what he’ll want for his next birthday party.

Stocking the Pantry

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I am always drawn to the food television shows or magazine articles about stocking your pantry with things that you have made yourself, or how to make fast and delicious meals on the fly from whatever is in your pantry. Yet it seems that no matter how many of these shows I watch or magazines I read, the pantry staples focused on are never the same ones that I always have stashed away. I’ve come to the conclusion that our pantries are often as individual to us as our fingerprints are; shaped by our own backgrounds, be this cultural, economic, geographic, etc. So I am not going to make the assumption that any of you have the same pantry staples as me. But if I might make one suggestion… you really should have some pizza dough in your freezer at all times. This is free advice, and therefore worth as much as you pay for it. Do with it as you will. In my opinion, good quality pizza dough is worth its weight in gold in terms of quick meal preparation.

You can use the pizza dough, of course, to make your own pizza, but that is just the beginning of the world of things that you can make with your own dough stashed away in the freezer. I use it to make flat breads to serve with homemade hummus and other meze (small plate dishes from Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines), a knock-off version of naan (a delicious Indian flatbread), bread sticks, garlic knots, calzone, flatbreads topped with oven roasted vegetables, and the possibilities continue. In fact, if you have any suggestions for how to use pizza dough to create other dishes, please share! I would love to hear your ideas and to expand my own possibilities.

If you do want to use the dough for its namesake and make your own pizza you won’t be disappointed. It is infinitely cheaper to make your own pizza than to order out, and you would be surprised by how a little bit of food goes a long way to top your creation. Let me warn you, however, that once you realize how few toppings your local pizza place is actually giving you compared to what they charge, you might be a bit perturbed.

The best part of all of this (except for eating your creation, of course) is that if you make a large batch of pizza dough you can freeze it in individual portions for up to a couple of months. I like to make a large batch of dough that creates roughly six portions. I freeze these individually in plastic bags, defrost them as needed, and when my supply gets low I whip up another batch when I can. Then when I find that I am in need of a dinner idea but don’t have much on hand, one of my first thoughts always goes to pizza with either a white or red sauce (and yes, I have used jarred marinara here in a pinch… no haters, please), and any number of combinations of the few food items I might have on hand. You will see some of my pizza creations appearing here over the next few months. After all, I did just stock my freezer with some dough… To get your feet wet, try the Harvest Moon Pizza posted recently (Pebble Beaches and Pizza). I hope you love it as much as my family does.

Harvest Moon Pizza on my Whole Wheat Pizza Dough.

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

Ingredients

3 c. water

1 tbsp. honey

2 packets active dry yeast (or 4 ½ tsp.)

4 c. whole wheat flour

2 c. bread flour (preferably whole wheat)

2 c. all purpose flour

3 tsp. salt

Olive oil, for oiling the proofing bowl

Directions

Pour the water into a microwave safe measuring cup and microwave for 1 minute or until hot to the touch. Don’t burn yourself, but the water should be very warm (around 100 degrees F or just over). Add the honey and the yeast to the water and stir to combine. Set the measuring cup aside for 10 minutes to let the yeast proof… aka get foamy. If you yeast doesn’t foam up, then try reheating the whole thing for a few seconds in the microwave. If it still doesn’t foam, then you may have had a bad batch of yeast and you’ll need to start again.

Getting the yeast ready to proof… aka get foamy.

Nicely proofed yeast. A little bit of honey or sugar goes a long way to give the yeast cells a nice snack.

Method 1: Electric Stand Mixer

Combine the flours and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook. Once the yeast has proofed, pour it into the bowl with the flours and the salt. Starting at the lowest speed, combine the ingredients and then let the machine “knead” the dough at the speed recommended by the manufacturer (mine suggests not going beyond speed 2 for doughs) for 6 minutes.

The dry ingredients in the mixer bowl. Be sure to mix the salt into the flour before adding the yeast. Salt can slow yeast down, so I don’t want the yeast to get a big mouthful of salt all on its own.

Getting everything mixed together.

The dough starts to incorporate into a ball.

Oh, how I love my stand mixer… 6 minutes later and you have the perfect dough ready to rise.

Method 2: By Hand

I have done this by hand many times, and there is something immensely satisfying about hand kneading your dough. However, it does take a bit more time and counter space than the stand mixer method. To do this by hand, simply combine the flours and salt in a large mixing bowl. Once the yeast has proofed, stir it into the flours until relatively well combined. Then turn it out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead by hand, adding as little flour as possible, for about 15 minutes. The dough should be elastic and only a little tacky to the touch.

Both methods come together here…

Once the dough is kneaded, whether by hand or machine, get a large bowl to allow the dough to proof or rise. Drizzle a little olive oil around the bowl’s walls. Form the dough into a large ball, place it in the oiled bowl and then flip it over so that the dough is oiled on all sides. This will keep it moist during the rising process. Cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and then cover that with a clean dish towel. Set the bowl aside in a warm place to rise for about one hour or until doubled in size.

Getting the dough ready to proof.

Tucking it in… For this batch I brought the dough downstairs where our wood burning stove was cranking out some heat. It was toasty warm down there, rather than the cool kitchen upstairs.

The plastic wrap helped keep my massive bowl of dough from completely overflowing.

Once the dough has proofed, gently press it down to deflate or degas the dough. Let it rest for about 5 minutes and then form it into individual portions. This batch should make 6 regular-sized pizzas, or you can use different portion sizes to create larger or smaller pizzas. Divide the dough up evenly, form each portion into a ball, and unless you are using the dough immediately place them into individual freezer bags.

At this point the dough can be frozen for 1-2 months and used as needed. From frozen, simply remove one of the portions the night before you want to use it and let it thaw in the refrigerator overnight. If like me you forget to do this step, do not fear. Simply remove the frozen dough from its plastic bag and place it on a microwave safe plate. Then microwave the dough for 1 minute, and let it sit in the microwave oven for 5 minutes. Then check to see how it is doing. If the center is still frozen, give it another 30 seconds in the microwave followed by another couple of minutes to rest. Then use the dough as desired.

Once the dough is thawed, or if you use it right after proofing, simply place your portion on a lightly floured work surface and roll it out or hand stretch it to your desired shape and size. Then proceed with any pizza or flat bread recipe of your choice. Enjoy!

Click here for a printable version of the Whole Wheat Pizza Dough recipe.

Pebble Beaches and Pizza

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In a previous post (A Day Off in Wine Country) I wrote about how this last summer Dave surprised me with a wonderful day off (aka a Surprise Day), touring local wineries on Vancouver Island like we used to do in New York. Then, just before the end of this last semester, I decided it was the perfect time for me to surprise him too. So Little Man and I went to pick him up at our normal time, but we weren’t going home for a slow cooker super that evening. Little Man “hid” behind his special teddy bear (both in the rear car seat of course) and yelled “SURPRISE!” as soon as Dave got to the car. We then whisked him off to the shore for a walk along the pebble beach at Neck Point.

View from the trail leading to Neck Point.

This Surprise Day was actually inspired by the water table at Little Man’s Strong Start program (more on that program in a future post). For those readers who don’t have toddlers, a water table is a sensory tool where kids can explore different textures and types of things in water. You can fill a plastic storage tub with anything you would like, then put in a couple inches of water… or sand… or whatever you would like. The one that Little Man was playing with had a couple of inches (or a few centimeters, depending on which side of the border/metric unit you prefer) of water in which floated a scattering of plastic sea animals, as well as a number of smooth, rounded pebbles and assorted sea shells. Little Man loved playing with the pebbles in the water and I asked the teacher where she found them. The answer was Neck Point.

Walking along the beach in the shadow of the forest.

Neck Point is a popular pebble beach and walking path in Nanaimo and I had heard of it but not had a chance to check it out yet. The directions posted on the Nanaimo Information website are as follows: “Turn off Hammond Bay Road onto Morningside Drive, north of Pipers Lagoon. Or, you can park at the end of McGuffie Rd and follow a path.” We followed those directions and our GPS and got there unscathed, with about an hour of light left before the sun started to go down. A perfect amount of time for a toddler-sized walk along the beach before food/snack is required.

View from the parking lot.

From the parking lot, you first see a beautiful pebble beach, but to get to the “neck” of Neck Point you need to walk a bit further. We took the trail to the left of the pebble beach and headed in what we hoped was the correct direction. The path curved around to the left, climbing slowly, and passing a couple of scenic benches and picnic tables. Then as we turned the corner and walked into the shadow of the mountain, we saw a beautiful log-strewn pebble beach. With the blue, blue sky and the cries of the cormorants, it was stunning. Little Man scampered down the stairs, over the logs and had a great time threw rocks into the sea. Dave clambered over rocks, over the logs, and out on some sea rocks looking like he was walking on water. In the shadow of the forest with the sun lowering behind the trees it started to get a bit cold, too cold for a picnic dinner. But once we get into springtime, we are definitely going to be giving that a try.

Stretching our legs

After a bit of family clambering around and pebble hunting, I realized that we hadn’t quite made it to the “neck.” So we continued down the curving path, up a long stairway and raised wooden walkway leading over the rocks, and down again towards the “neck.” During low tides the “neck” consists of a narrow strip of pebbly land that juts out to a “head” of rocks surrounded by sea. We were lucky in our timing and were going out just before the tide started to come back in. The view was gorgeous, and we all had fun climbing around… though I was wishing we had brought Little Man’s lion tether as he kept creeping closer to the edge and wasn’t feeling like holding his parents’ hands while climbing like a little mountain goat. A few tussles later and we decided it was time to head back for dinner.

Dave walking on water.

Timber strewn pebble beach

The walkway to the “neck” of Neck Point.

Neck Point at low tide reveals a narrow pebble path to the sea rocks.

Climbing on the sea rocks.

On this particular night I was going to treat Dave to our favorite Indian place, Amrikos, for dinner. Our plans changed when we discovered that the restaurant had suffered a horrible fire and had moved locations at least temporarily. So our dinner was good, but a bit subdued that evening. To make up for it, the next weekend I made a pizza inspired by one of our favorite restaurants called Farm in Bloomington, Indiana. The food is amazing and it’s still a place that we miss even years after moving from the area.

The Harvest Moon Pizza is inspired by one of their seasonal flatbreads. The Farm version used locally sourced kielbasa and smoked gouda, along with homemade sauerkraut and grainy mustard. It may sound a bit odd on your pizza, but it is absolutely delicious. My version uses more premade items, and switches up the flavors a bit, but it still comes from that homey, cold-weather type of comfort food… on a pizza crust. Feel free to make your own pizza dough, I’ll be sharing my recipe for that in an upcoming post, or pick some up premade from your favorite store or pizzeria. I’d suggest not buying the pre-baked variety, but go for something that is still the dough that you can shape and season to your own liking.

Harvest Moon Pizza

Ingredients

Premade whole wheat pizza dough (white flour dough can be used too)

2 Tbsp. butter

2 Tbsp. flour

1 cup milk, preferably whole milk but any grade will do

1 bay leaf

1 garlic clove, crushed

¼ tsp. grated nutmeg

1 tsp. dried mustard powder

¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (not the canned stuff)

Salt and pepper, to taste

Olive oil

1 tsp. herbs de provance (or other dried green herb like thyme, basil or oregano)

½ package kielbasa, sliced into ¼ inch rings (save the rest for another meal)

Small can of sauerkraut, drained

1 ½ cups good quality white cheddar, freshly shredded

Directions

Preheat your oven to 450 Fahrenheit. If you have one, this is the time to put your pizza stone in your oven. Mine stays on the lower rack all the time, so it’s always there when I want some solid, ceramic-based heat.

The Sauce

First, make your roux, or mixture of butter (or other fat) and flour. In a medium saucepan, melt the butter over medium low heat. Once the butter is melted whisk in the flour, and keep on whisking for one minute. Watch your roux like a hawk, and do your best to not let the flour color, turning down the heat if necessary. After a good minute, slowly pour in the milk, whisking all the while until everything is smoothly combined into a thick béchamel. Add the bay leaf, garlic clove, nutmeg, and mustard powder to your sauce, and cook gently for about 5 minutes or until very thick, stirring often. This is not a light béchamel for pasta, but is a thicker version for the white sauce for your pizza. Your sauce will be more robust rather than dainty. Once the sauce has thickened whisk in the parmesan cheese until velvety smooth. Taste your sauce for seasoning, adding a little salt and pepper if necessary. You should have a slight bite from the mustard, but it should not be overpowering. Once the flavors are to your liking, take the sauce off the heat and set it aside.

The beginning of a roux, or thickener made from butter (or other fat) and flour.

Adding the flour

Now whisk like you mean it

Adding flavor to your bechamel, in this case from garlic, a bay leaf and mustard powder.

The bechamel is thickened.

Parmesan cheese rounds out this flavorful white sauce for your pizza.

The Pizza

If you have a pizza stone, it should already be heated in your oven. If you do not have a pizza stone, place a large baking sheet upside down on your middle oven rack. This will serve as your stone.

Heat a non-stick skillet over medium-high heat, and then add your kielbasa slices to the pan. Continue to cook and toss your kielbasa until it is golden brown in spots. Then turn the kielbasa out of the pan onto a paper towel- lined plate and set it aside.

Adding the kielbasa to the hot pan.

Golden brown kielbasa for the pizza.

Using lightly floured hands and board, roll or stretch your pizza dough out into a circle. I like whole wheat here, but if you can only find white flour dough that is good too. The dough should be rather thin. Pierce the dough all over with a fork (or dough docker… I love mine. It does this task in about one second), leaving a scant inch border around the edges for the crust to rise. These little holes will keep large bubbles from forming in the middle of your pizza dough.

Docking the dough, or piercing it all over with little holes, keeps bubbles from popping up and pushing your toppings to the side.

Transfer the dough to a pizza peel, or if you don’t have one you can use a metal pizza pan or the back of another large baking sheet. Drizzle the dough with a little bit of olive oil, and then sprinkle over the Herbs de Provence or other dried green herb mixture. This ensures that you have great flavor in every layer of this pizza. Slide the dough onto the pizza stone or upside down baking sheet in your oven, and bake for about 10 minutes or until starting to brown in spots. The crust may not yet be fully cooked, but I find this step creates a crisper and less doughy crust, and it will finish cooking in the next step.

Seasoning the pizza dough with olive oil, herbs de provance and a little salt.

The prepared crust.

Remove the pizza crust from the oven and transfer it back to your work surface. Now you get to put all the pieces together. Slather the crust with your mustard cheese sauce, leaving a border around the edges for your crust. Scatter the browned kielbasa evenly over the sauce. Then scatter a thin layer of sauerkraut over the sauce. You likely won’t use the whole can, but can serve the extra in a small bowl for passing at the table. Lastly, cover the pizza generously with your shredded, white cheddar cheese. This is where I have to fight off big boy and little boy hands from snatching the cheese right off the pizza before I can get it into the oven. Slide it back in the oven before an all-out battle breaks out in your kitchen.

When saucing your pizza crust, be sure to leave a nice border for the crust.

Kielbasa scattered over the pizza.

First give a light scattering of sauerkraut to your pizza, then cover it with a generous helping of freshly shredded white cheddar.

Bake this for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese melts and gets bubbly and brown on top. Sometimes I switch the oven to broil, and then stand guard like a hawk until the cheese is nicely browned. From personal experience, don’t step away from a broiling oven for a second or you might just get a bit more “carmelization” than you hoped for. Remove the pizza from the oven, and let it sit for a moment so it isn’t “hot lava” hot. Then slice, serve and enjoy! We like to serve this with a harvest or Oktoberfest ale, and a green leafy salad with sliced apple and walnuts and a balsamic vinaigrette. Delicious!

The pizza as it is just slid into the oven on my pizza stone.

Golden, bubbly and delicious, dinner is ready!

Click here for a printable version of the Harvest Moon Pizza recipe.

Thanksgiving in a Foreign Land

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This is Thanksgiving week… American Thanksgiving, I should say. This is, however, not just any Thanksgiving, but my first Thanksgiving out of the country and the 150^th anniversary of when President Lincoln established it as the third national holiday (along with Independence Day and Washington’s Birthday). The holiday takes on a different feeling when you think of the timing; the end of the Civil War, the government trying to hold the increasingly fragmented nation together. How do you forge a lasting union for a nation of people with loyalties, cultures and traditions that span the globe? Part of the answer, apparently, was to give them a common tradition tying together families across the country in thanksgiving.

Two cousins in a crib. The “pricelessness” of family at Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday of the year. The focus on food and family has become increasingly important to me, first when I moved across the States for graduate school, then trying to create new homes with Dave as we progressed through our impromptu academic tour of the Midwest, and now with Little Man in Canada. So here we are, looking for ways to create our own new identities, to create new family traditions, and to create a dual nationality identity for our son.

Thanksgiving, however, is anything but a simple holiday. The children’s stories of pilgrims and Indians sitting down to a nice turkey dinner are just that… stories. But the creation of Thanksgiving, the annual retelling of this fictitious meal uniting disparate peoples, is still a powerful tool today. For a fascinating study of the history (and fiction) of Thanksgiving, please check out Janet Siskind’s The Invention of Thanksgiving (click on the link to download a pdf of the article). You’ll never think of American Thanksgiving in the same way again… but in a good way. It’s powerful, and so is the resulting holiday.

For my personal purposes, not so differently from Lincoln’s, Thanksgiving has long been about creating a sense of home when “home” is not necessarily apparent. A sense of family when family is far away. A sense of belonging in a place that is still a bit foreign.

When living in upstate New York, this meant celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving with Dave. Until we met I had no idea that Canada had a Thanksgiving; assuming that it was a uniquely American holiday. It is and it isn’t.

Thanksgiving in Canada is celebrated on the 2^nd Monday of October, not the 4^th Thursday of November. It is a harvest celebration, without any stories of Pilgrims and Indians. The meal is mostly the same with turkey, stuffing and the sides. However, Canadians tend to avoid the dodgy green bean casseroles, with most Canadians I know being horrified by the dish. In Canada, Thanksgiving is a relatively minor holiday and is quickly eclipsed by Halloween. I didn’t quite understand this until moving to Canada this year. For all of my adult life, even when moving often, the idea of a Thanksgiving alone or uncelebrated was tragic.

One Thanksgiving when we were first dating, Dave was not going to be able to join anyone’s family dinner since he needed to stay in town to finish writing his Master’s Thesis. This seemed an abomination to me that someone would be home, alone, on Thanksgiving, with only the hope of an at best mediocre TV dinner to look forward to. So even though I was definitely going out of town to be with my adopted New York family for Thanksgiving, I devised a nice, stay at home version for Dave. All he would have to do was put things in the preheated oven at a certain time, take them out, reheat a couple of things, and he’d have his own pint-sized Thanksgiving meal. I think I even wrote out the instructions for him, down to the unwrapping of the carton of crescent rolls and how to form/bake them. After all, this Canadian obviously did not understand the importance of the holiday since he was willing to sacrifice it. Who knew how far his ignorance of the proper foods went? In theory, this should have been fantastic, or at least sweet. In reality, it has lived in our combined memory as well intentioned, but horrific. I mean absolutely disgusting and barely edible. He’s lucky that it was partially edible, since even the local pizza places weren’t delivering that evening.

Dave’s Thanksgiving meal was to be an oven-roasted Cornish game hen, mashed potatoes (oy!), gravy, sweet potato praline, balsamic vinegared brussel sprouts (double oy!), canned crescent rolls (hence the instructions) and I think a mini-pumpkin pie for dessert… but that might also have been burned in the oven. Of all this, the Cornish game hen was good, the crescent rolls were passable, and the sweet potato praline saved the day. The mashed potatoes, on the other hand, were raw. The brussel sprouts were disgusting. The pie, if it ever existed, has not survived in memory. It would take me a good 8 years to make passable mashed potatoes. After this (and other experiences) I was forbidden by friends and family alike to attempt mashed potatoes. In fact, just a week ago I made pork chops with mashed potatoes and gravy, and both Dave and I commented on the fact that I just might have learned how to actually cook them properly. I have no idea how a person who even then was a pretty good cook could not make mashed potatoes.

And while the brussel sprouts (yes, I can cook these well now too) were so bad that they don’t even deserve discussion here, I will share with you the one glowing beacon of the day; Praline Sweet Potatoes. These are now the one thing, no matter whose Thanksgiving I am going to, that I always bring with me. They are almost sweet enough to be a dessert, but have just a hint of a savory edge that pairs excellently with turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce and the rest.

Dave’s Mom’s gorgeous table setting with fresh persimmon candle holders.

The pictures in this post are from my first Canadian Thanksgiving. They look the part and embody that sense of Thanksgiving that I think will likely be missing from our American Thanksgiving this year. We’re still fiddling with tradition, and straddling the line between nations. Say “Happy Thanksgiving” to a Canadian this time of year, and you get some very confused looks since for them Thanksgiving was over a month ago. There will be new photos of new traditions coming soon. In the meantime, no matter what we are doing I plan on keeping family close and tradition a bit loose.

I don’t have step-by-step pictures here, but the recipe is easy and the results are worth trying for even without a safety net of photo documentation.

Praline Sweet Potato

2 lbs. whole sweet potatoes (not from a can)

¼ cup milk

1 egg, slightly beaten

1 tsp. salt

Pepper to taste

½ cup brown sugar, packed

¼ cup butter, melted

¼ cup dark corn syrup

1 heaping cup of pecans, chopped

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Pierce the raw sweet potatoes all over with a sharp knife and place them on an aluminum foil lined baking sheet. Roast the sweet potatoes in the oven until soft and easily pierced with a fork, about 45 minutes to an hour. In the meantime, butter a 2-3 quart shallow casserole dish and set it aside. Once the sweet potatoes are cooked through, allow them to cool until they are easy to handle with your hands. Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees.

2. Tear the skins from the sweet potatoes and put the orange flesh into a large mixing bowl. Mash the sweet potatoes until they are creamy. Add the milk, egg, salt and pepper and stir to combine. Spoon the sweet potato mixture into the buttered casserole dish.

3. In a small bowl combine the brown sugar, butter and corn syrup. Pour this over the sweet potato casserole and spread it around so that all of the sweet potato is covered. Sprinkle the pecans evenly over top.

4. Bake the casserole uncovered for 45 minutes, or until it is set. The topping will still be slightly soft at this point, but it will harden as the dish cools. Watch the pecans towards the end of the cooking time. If they start to brown too much or burn, drape a piece of aluminum foil over top to slow the browning.

Click here for a printable version the Praline Sweet Potatoes recipe.

Playing in the Mud

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It was hot. So hot that if I left my trowel in the sun for even a few moments you could have fried an egg on the metal blade. Blazing hot, but to think of it in those terms made you feel even hotter. I was collecting yet another bag of broken pottery (officially called coarse ware or cook pot ware, affectionately called crap ware) in my first archaeological field season in Turkey. I wasn’t exactly sure that I knew what I was doing, and I had no idea what to do with the stuff I was digging up, other than to record it properly. I hadn’t yet learned how to take the material remains and interpret those back into the lives of ancient people. Somewhere during the collection of that bag of boring, unpainted, undifferentiated pot sherds, I actually stopped to look at one.

At work analyzing pot sherds in Turkey.

It was the same earth-beige color as the rest. Roughly the same shape as the palm of my hand, and on the outside surface was a perfectly clear finger print preserved in the clay. The finger print of the woman or man who had actually made the pot whose surviving piece I now held. This print was not decorative, but was simply a movement recorded in clay; and I was hooked. For the first time, all the books on ancient history, all the poorly made films about ancient civilizations (Alexander with Colin Farrell… hours of my life I can never get back), all the museum displays, all of it finally was linked back to real people. There were real people who made real pots that quite often weren’t pretty, but I bet could be used to put together a delicious meal.

One of thousands…

Those pot sherds became the focus of my life for a good five plus years. My dissertation was based on thousands of pot sherds, enough sherds to make your eyes cross and fingers ache just at the thought of analyzing them all. When I was writing up my findings back in Indiana, Dave surprised me with a present of a pottery class. It was something I’d always wanted to do, but had never made the time. Now that I was crunching numbers and trying to interpret ancient life from thousands upon thousands of pot sherds, I was finally going to see what went into making a pot. And I loved it! There is something magical about pulling the pottery up from the wheel and seeing it transform before you eyes and between your hands… even if it falls.

Pottery I made in Indiana.

When we moved from Indiana to Iowa, I lost access to that studio and then Little Man came on the scene and I hadn’t been able to get back to pottery until now. I’d heard that through the city of Nanaimo there was access to a pottery studio where they also taught classes. So I tracked down a copy of the Nanaimo Parks, Recreation and Culture Activity Guide and found the information on the Bowen Park pottery studio (in the senior center at 500 Bowen Road). The best part was that they offered multiple days of open drop in time, where as long as you already know what you are doing you can come by for a small fee and use their facilities. I was hoping that the muscle memory of throwing pottery would come back, even though I hadn’t held clay for nearly three years. And it did… more or less.

With my reintroduction to the world of throwing pottery, I wanted to cook dinner in a casserole dish or pot that I’d made myself. I wanted to use my own pottery again, to feel the accomplishment of creating something useful not just pretty. I also wanted comfort food, which meant casserole, and the mother of all casseroles in our household is Chicken Taco Casserole.

Chicken Taco Casserole is not a light meal, and frankly I don’t recommend trying to lighten it. I’ve tried it with baked tortilla chips, and they just dissolved in an unappetizing mush. I’ve tried it with reduced fat canned soup (yes, you heard me right, this recipe calls for canned soup. Embrace the retro ingredient) and that was a mistake; total lack of flavor and an off putting texture. This is one of those go big or go home casseroles that we don’t make often, but we savor every delicious bite, scraping our plates (and the casserole dish) clean. And while you certainly don’t have to bake this in a ceramic casserole made by yourself or a local artisan, I have to tell you that it’s really great if you can. I don’t know why, but it just seems like things taste better when served in your own pottery, pottery made for you, or pottery made by a local artisan. It’s similar to how things you grow in your own garden taste better than those things you buy in a store. It’s powerful when you know the hands that made something, not just an extruder or mold press half way across the world. So if you get a chance, support your local potter. You’d be amazed at the craft and artistry that goes into what seems like a simple bowl or mug.

My first casserole dish, made in Indiana.

Chicken Taco Casserole

This casserole is the definition of family comfort food for me. It’s a family recipe that we’ve tweaked over the years and my parents make it differently than I do, and my brother has his own spin on it too. The ingredients below give a nicely spicy version, but in terms of full disclosure, I haven’t been able to make it with any spice since Little Man came along. We’re hoping to get him there some day, but for now I omit the chili flakes all together (unless I’m feeling risky and just give a sprinkle to the sauteing chicken), and instead of a half can of jalapenos, I use a full can of mild green chilies. The taste is still great, but I can’t wait for Little Man’s palate to develop to spicy foods… Mama misses her chilies.

And a quick warning… The first time my dad and I tried this casserole with the added chips and cheese on top… the topping never made it to the table. We pulled the delicious casserole out of the oven, called the rest of the family to dinner, and stood there in the kitchen eating the chips and cheese off of the top. By the time the rest of the family got there we’d smoothed out the top of the casserole and no one was the wiser… until now.

Ingredients

3 chicken breasts, boneless and skinless

Salt and Pepper

½ tsp. chili flakes

2 cans cream of mushroom soup

2 cans cream of chicken soup

½ small can of diced green chilies

½ small can of diced jalapenos

2 cups grated cheddar cheese

1 large bag of good quality tortilla chips

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350º Fahrenheit and prepare your favorite casserole dish by giving it a generous spray of cooking oil.

2. Heat a large, nonstick skillet over medium high heat and add a little oil. Sprinkle the chicken breasts with salt, pepper and half the chili flakes. Put the breasts into the hot pan spice side down. Then sprinkle the exposed side with salt, pepper and the remaining chili flakes. Cook until golden, then flip and sear again. Saute until the chicken is cooked through, about 10-12 minutes total.

These chicken breasts were large, so I only used two rather than the three suggested in the recipe. Taster’s preference.

The beauty of browned food…

3. In the meantime, in a large mixing bowl combine the soups, the chilies and a good sized cup of grated cheddar. Mix this all together and set it aside.

The casserole base with the green chilies, but alas no jalapenos.

The casserole base with cheddar cheese.

4. Once the chicken is cooked through, remove it to a plate and shred it into large strips. Once shredded add the chicken to the rest of the casserole mixture and stir to combine.

The combined mixture… the start of a beautiful thing.

5. Now comes the fun part, layering. Grab a good sized handful of your chips and crush them into the bottom of your casserole. This should more or less just flatten them out a bit to make a good base. Then layer in approximately 1/3 of your casserole mixture, and smooth it out. Top this with another good handful of chips, and repeat the layers until you cap off the casserole with the last of the mixture. Be sure to reserve a good handful of chips and about 1/2 cup of grated cheddar for the topping later.

Starting the layering with some crushed chips at the bottom of a casserole dish.

The last layer of chips.

The top layer of the casserole mixture caps off the chips, protecting them from burning.

Ready for the oven.

6. Put the casserole on a baking sheet (in case of boil overs) and slide the whole thing into your hot oven. Bake for 30 minutes, or until bubbly and hot. Pull the casserole out of the oven, top it with your reserved chips and cheese, and return it to the oven to just melt the cheese. Watch it like a hawk here in case the chips start to burn. Once the cheese is melted and the chips brown up on the tips, remove the casserole, let it sit for about 10 minutes (if you can hold off the savage hordes long enough) and then enjoy.

Deliciously browned.

Click here for a printable version of the Chicken Taco Casserole recipe.

As you can see, one chip has already been stolen by someone with fast hands while I was reaching for the camera.

A Corn Maze and the Making of Fall Traditions

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When Dave and I first started dating I was surprised to learn that Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving also; though their holiday is a month earlier (on the second Monday in October). I’d always thought of Thanksgiving as a uniquely American holiday, but in fact it is not. The importance of the Thanksgiving meal, however, does vary greatly between the two nations. In Canada, or at least on Vancouver Island, there no displays in stores, no Thanksgiving-themed commercials, no chatter about getting together with family, or trying to figure out long distance travel to get home for this one evening. Instead, all the focus seems to be on Halloween, complete with fireworks. Our cats will not be amused…

With this difference in Autumn celebrations, I feel out of sync with the season. Halloween seems on time, but the fact that Thanksgiving is already over leaves me feeling like I’ve missed out on something important. We had a great Canadian Thanksgiving, and we will be celebrating American Thanksgiving come the end of November, but in the meantime we’re trying to carve out some new Fall traditions and get into sync with our new community. In Nanaimo that means a trip to McNab’s Corn Maze and Pumpkin Patch.

A perfectly foggy day for the corn maze and pumpkin patch.

The day we went was a little late in the season, since it was after Thanksgiving (Canadian) and most of the really big pumpkins were gone. However, they had tons of small to medium pumpkins, a local school fundraiser with all the homemade baked goods my heart could ask for, and the corn maze was still in full swing. I was already feeling nostalgic for Iowa since a much-missed friend was throwing a fall celebration party with all of our friends, and we had just passed the dates for two of our favorite things to do in Iowa; the Farm Crawl and the Brews and Muse Festival at Peacetree Brewery. Oh, friends, we were sure missing you on those weekends (especially those friends who shall remain nameless but kept sending emails and Facebook comments about the delicious new brews from Peacetree that we were missing out on… trisky hobbits that you are).

So with homesick hearts we went looking for new traditions at the pumpkin patch. I assure you I never thought in my life that I’d say I was homesick for Iowa, but I’m getting sincerely tired of leaving places behind that have become home. In our quest for new traditions to make this place home, McNabb’s did not disappoint.

Even after living in the American Midwest for five years, I had never been to a corn maze. At Farm Crawl there was a corn maze, but I was always more interested in Pierce’s Pumpkin Patch, the borscht served at Coyote Run Farm, and the amazing preserves, people and brew (Peacetree again…) at Blue Gate Farm. So McNab’s was my first time to be in and amongst the corn.

Dave and Little Man heading towards the corn maze.

Surrounded by corn… like being back in Iowa.

The day was perfectly foggy for an Autumn trip to the pumpkin patch, and we headed off to the maze first. We had a great time trying to get lost, and searching (often fruitlessly) for the little markers hidden in the paths. Apparently the markers haven’t been moved in years so the locals all know where they are, but since we’re new the hunt was still fun. Once the chill of the maze started to get to us, and the enclosed space of the corn from Little Man’s viewpoint started to wear on him, we took the Hay Ride tractor to the pumpkin patch. Here we selected a couple of pumpkins, had them measured and then heaved them back to the tractor, wishing we had brought the stroller to carry our pumpkin booty.

Hmmm… Which one can I carry all the way to the front?

As we got off the tractor at the front of the farm, we ran into some friends from town, and hung around the fire pits chatting. That is the sort of thing you miss when you move often; the regular meeting of friends in public places. Little Man ran around with their kids, visiting the piglets and goats, and climbing massive downed stumps.

When Little Man finally started showing signs of wearing down and needing lunch, we headed off for lunch. We could have stayed there for hot dogs, but the morning was cold and we all wanted some warm, inside rest. So we headed for Coco Café in Cedar. The café’s name is an acronym for the Cedar Opportunities Co-Operative, whose mission is to provide developmentally disabled adults with employment opportunities within their community. This year the maze was dedicated to Coco’s, and I had heard of it before as well. It has the reputation of being a nice little café with cozy atmosphere and good, local food, for good prices. Perfect.

Walking into Coco Café I caught a glimpse of our little family in the glass door; all looking cold, dazed, hungry, and distinctively muddy. Inside I ordered a hot cocoa, and Dave got coffee. Little Man was very pleased with my drink choice, and did his best to polish off my whipped cream before I could get to it myself. Dave had a Thai Curried Chicken Panini with a green side salad. Little Man had the grilled cheese on an awesome whole wheat bread; and I had a massive bowl of Beef and Barley soup complete with a good-sized hunk of warm Pumpernickel, rich with molasses. Dave’s Panini was great, and we were both impressed with the salad. After our time in the Midwest we had come to loath side salads since inevitably they were tasteless piles of wilted, ice berg lettuce buried under a mound of not-cheese. At Coco Cafe even the side salads were great. Not a hint of iceberg lettuce to be seen, but only dark, lovely salad greens with a homemade vinaigrette. Little Man liked his sandwich, but preferred my cocoa; and my soup was divine. It was full of great vegetables, barley and beef, the broth was rich and stew-like with a good amount of black pepper. This soup was a perfect example of why homemade soup is so much better than the stuff from a can. All in all we had a great, home style lunch that did not break the bank, and which warmed us up from our stomachs to our fingers and toes.

On the way back home, Dave struggled to keep Little Man awake so that he could take a nice long nap at home. Little Man, for his part, did his best to hide behind his Pooh Bear and fall asleep. In the end we all had great naps, and ever since I’ve been fixated on hot beverages. I want drinks that I can hold in a real mug, not paper or factory made, but something made by real hands, something that fits nicely between my palms, and warms me from the fingers on out. And that brings me to my family’s Wassle; a hot mulled cider that fills the home and the heart with the aroma of the holidays.

This recipe for wassle comes from my dad’s side of the family, and just a whiff of this simmering away in the slow cooker makes me think of “family.” I don’t mean “family” in the sense of just the three of us, but of gatherings of loved ones, whether or not you are biologically related, where you can just relax and be at home. In fact, it’s worth making this wassle just for the aroma.

When Dave and I first made this wassle for our friends-who-became-family in upstate New York, their first comment was “mmmm… this is good…” followed quickly by asking if we’d ever tried this with rum. We hadn’t. We did. It was delicious. But I have to say, this wassle is amazing on its own and doesn’t need any accoutrement. What sets it apart from other mulled ciders I’ve tried is the mixture of apple cider with pineapple, orange and apricot nectars. Cardamom and cinnamon round out the spiciness of the hot, hot drink, and are key to its aroma. There is no added sugar, the juices are sweet enough as it is. So if you’re having friends/family over and want that scent of the holidays that will stop them in their tracks the minute they set foot in your home, this is the wassle for you. The only problem will be getting them to leave later, since it’s so nice to just sit with loved ones while cradling a mug of this wassle in your hands.

Wassle (A Hot Mulled Cider)

Ingredients

4 cups apple cider

4 cups unsweetened pineapple juice

1 ½ cup apricot nectar

1 cup orange juice

6 cinnamon sticks

1 tsp. whole green cardamom

Directions:

Pour all juices into your slow cooker and turn it on to high.
Place the cardamom pods on your cutting board and crush them with the back of a spoon or flat of a knife. Alternatively, crush the pods in a mortar and pestle (I just can’t find mine since the move…)
Add the cinnamon and crushed cardamom to the slow cooker.
Cover and heat until pipping hot, then turn the slow cooker down to low and simmer the wassle for 25 minutes. Enjoy!
Optional: float a new cinnamon stick in each mug.

Click here for a printable version of the Wassle recipe.

The Sheep Are Out…

I'm a mom, an anthropologist, and a food lover finding her way on a small farm on Vancouver Island

Category Archives: Recipes

More Thoughts on Hummus

A Request for Hummus

Stocking the Pantry 2: The Bread Edition

I woke up to the snow…

Birthday Party Food for Kiddos… and Their Very Patient Parents

Stocking the Pantry

Pebble Beaches and Pizza

Thanksgiving in a Foreign Land

Playing in the Mud

A Corn Maze and the Making of Fall Traditions

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