Loving Fall (and food)

Beautiful isn't it? Autumn, it's the best. We sat on a rock with friends, eating our picnic lunch. This was the scene before us. Winter is rough here in NY, but I don't think I would ever be content to live somewhere without the four seasons. I'm sure there are people who would disagree. I guess it's what you are used to.

The candles are lit. Bringing warmth and light to the table since it's getting dark early these days. Anything left in the fridge is being turned into soup. "Leftover Soup" is always a hit. I can never duplicate Leftover Soup, but I can make an equally tasty new one.

Curries and stews are happening, cosy comfy bowls of warmth. As it gets colder and those beautiful leaves disappear, I put the color on the table. I am a true believer in the effect of beauty and color on our souls. Those gourd candle holders are festive and very simple to make. Just drill the proper size hole and stick your candles in. Bringing natural beauty into the home is easy and very cheap, even free. Grow some gourds (they pretty much grow themselves), pick up some acorns and leaves.

I'll take any excuse to use the oven, it warms up the house. Just like Leftover Soup, crumbles are  popular on my table. Any fruit or fruit combination will work. Frozen, fresh or canned fruits topped with oats, sucanat, butter and flour make for a more cheerful afternoon when that sun starts to go down. The smell of good things baking always lifts up the mood of the home.

I don't bake cookies that often. Just for holidays or special occasion. Halloween kicks off the cookie baking season for me. I'd rather the kids satisfy their sugar urge with home made cookies rather than the artificial candy that will inevitably appear. To color the gray mushrooms and black bats I used activated charcoal, just like my black donuts and black pie. 

I consider the arrival of Fall a worthy enough occasion to celebrate with friends and fall leaf cookies.
I am feeling happy, warm, and almost ready to take on winter.

Fall Food

Fall has hit New York. I have a fire in the fireplace, an ever brewing teapot, knitting projects in full swing, and a mind filled with the tastes, colors and smells of autumn. I recently discovered this one and have already made them four times. Sweet potato ravioli in browned butter with basil. They are so good and very addictive.  I make them when I am having company, so I don't eat too many.

I found them in Simply Ming One-Pot Meals. What makes them so easy is that you use pre-made wonton wrappers. I baked up a bunch of sweet potatoes and mashed them up in the Vitamix. I actually do a batch of sweet potato puree each week because I love my sweet potato smoothie every afternoon. When folks get that mid day coffee craving, I get a sweet potato smoothie craving.

I got that over at Sweet Potato Soul.

Super easy, I flavor the mash only with ground ginger and black pepper. You must use a little egg was to "glue" these guys together. 

When they are all assembled you brown them in salted butter, throw in lots of chopped fresh basil and there it is. Easy to make and way too easy to eat. A great appetizer or meal.

Looking Glass Flowers: mAd TeA 2015

'O Tiger-lily,' said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, 'I WISH you could talk!'

'We CAN talk,' said the Tiger-lily: 'when there's anybody worth talking to.'

Alice was so astonished that she could not speak for a minute: 

it quite seemed to take her breath away. 

At length, as the Tiger-lily only went on waving about, she spoke again, in a timid voice--almost in a whisper. 

'And can ALL the flowers talk?'

'As well as YOU can,' said the Tiger-lily. 'And a great deal louder.'

'How is it you can all talk so nicely?' Alice said, hoping to get it into a better temper by a compliment. 'I've been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk.'

Put your hand down, and feel the ground,' said the Tiger-lily. 'Then you'll know why.'

Alice did so. 'It's very hard,' she said, 'but I don't see what that has to do with 'it.'

'In most gardens,' the Tiger-lily said, 'they make the beds too soft--so that the flowers are always asleep.'

This sounded a very good reason, and Alice was quite pleased to know it. 'I never thought of that before!' she said.

The Menu:

"It's my own  invention."

Mushroom Tarts- chickpea shortbread with mushroom and wild arugula topping

5 Layer Cake- orange cake with cranberry cream and blueberries

Flower Sandwiches- pickled beet butter on whole wheat with chopped egg centers

and of course lots and lots of TEA

The Alice Dolls: Little Pullip Alice & 1966 Madame Alexander Alice

My Mad Tea Party 2013 

click here

Dipping Salads

What makes fast food so easy to eat? It's available when you feel hungry. I often put together a "dipping salad" for those times when you might reach for a bag of chips or cookies. First off, I try not to buy chips and cookies often. I mostly do when I am having guests. For everyday I go with raw fruit and veg with a tasty dip. It's crunchy, it's colorful (big plus for me!), sweet  and salty. 

Dipping salads are so hands-on they sometimes do end up being played with. Sword fights with celery, making faces or other designs with the veg, and if you are small enough you can even wear it!

Yesterday we had this beautiful hot pink veggie. Do you know what it is?

Radish! Aren't these pretty? They are very sweet too. I have been eating these with slices of tart green apples, layering them together to make little sandwiches. I have mentioned this before, if you wash all your vegetables at one time to have them ready it will be much easier to eat them quickly. Remember, what makes it "fast" is that it is available immediately. With a bit of preparation you can have quick healthy snacks always at hand.

Halloween and black donuts

I have always liked all things spooky. Bats, spiderwebs, Frankenstein and green glowing the dark aliens. But each year I see more and more gore and horror popping up in our local Halloween events. I won't participate in this kind of entertainment. I won't shop in a store that has severed limbs and decapitated heads hanging around as part of their decor. I'm all for make believe and fantasy. But murder is real, and should not be part of any celebration. 

That's why I love my daughter's Dark Elf. It's a good example of how you can have fun, be creepy and still bring beauty and light to the world. People always respond in a positive way to her costumes. It makes them happy, they can't help smiling. They ask to take pictures with her and give her lots of encouragement.

Now on to other dark things. My 11 yo said she wanted to eat black food. I was making donuts, I said if you can come up with a way to make black naturally we'll do it. She immediately said "We can use activated charcoal." She was right! It worked. I mixed some into the donut glaze and it turned extremely black. So now we have a tasty donut that can absorb any toxins from your digestive system!

She was very pleased with her black donuts and now wants a black pumpkin pie. I'll let you know how that turns out.

p.s. Creepy clothes pins painted by this happy girl.

Foraging Fun: Chicken-of-the-Woods

We went out looking for tree nuts and ended up instead with this lovely Chicken-of-the-Woods mushroom. My husband was the one to spot it, as I tramped right over it! It is also called Sulpher Shelf and it is a favorite foraged mushroom because not only is it very nice to eat, but there are no poison lookalikes. Some folks say it really doesn't taste like chicken, I think it does. The texture is very much like chicken breast. Like tofu it will become whatever you flavor it to be. Really, if you didn't know this was a mushroom, wouldn't you think this sliced up bit is cooked chicken breast? The black and white feather is turkey, found near the mushroom.

Chicken-of-the-Woods grows on trees, logs and roots. Bring a sharp knife, you'll have to slice it off. Look at this color! We found two this size, but some bunches can be huge. It you are lucky enough to come across a giant clump you should cook it at once if you won't be able to eat it all within a couple of days. After it's cooked, freeze it and throw it into soups and stews, rice dishes, casseroles or pasta as you want it. You can also dry it out to store it, but it requires more fat to cook it in to rehydrate. 

The underside ranges from light yellow to white. They are best eaten when they are young and tender. When they get big they are hard and woody. In that case I would just trim off the very tips to eat.

You can bake it, braise it or as I did here, saute it. Since finding this Chicken-of-the-Woods was a surprise treat I had to fit it into my already planned lunch, curried pumpkin soup. We came home from our foraging walk hungry. As the soup was heating up I sauteed the mushroom. Very tasty, like crispy bits of fried chicken.

You will find these mushrooms growing in shady woods and sunny city parks. We found ours on the grounds of Sunnyside, Washington Irving's home. As I've said, there are no poison lookalikes for Chicken-of-the-Woods, so if you are new to mushroom hunting, this is a good one to start with.

Berries are Back!

The berries are back. I've posted before about my compulsion to pick. It seems like every time we go for a nature walk these days we end up stuck (literally!) picking berries. Blackberries and wild raspberries are ready to go right now. We get all scratched up and sticky. We battle thorns, poison ivy and spider webs. We need tick checks when we get home (we have lots of nasty ticks here). But we still go into the thickets because it's fun and the reward of wild berries is worth it.

We were lucky to find a running stream to wash off our very sticky hands.

I have been making a lot of berry crumbles, the days have been fairly cool for this time of year and I'm in the mood to bake. I use oats, coconut sugar, butter and whatever flour I happen to grind up. I keep coconut, wheat berries, and other grains in the freezer to make into quick flours in the Vitamix.

Yummy berry scones for tea.

 I am out of berries, so we will be off and picking again later this week. I am always on the lookout for more yummy berry recipe ideas, so if you have any please do share!

Yarn Berry

My daughter was busy working on Photoshop. "Don't look!", "It's a surprise!" she said whenever I would walk by. She surprised me with this Yarn Berry that she based on my berry blog post.

Of course I had to share it here!

Then we went picking again...

I promise my next post will have nothing to do with berries.

Summer Berry Knits

Why am I knitting during the hottest most humid week of the summer? I don't know! With all the other summer activities I thought I would put knitting off until September, but I just couldn't do it. I found a bag full of ends of some of my favorite yarns. Little red balls like berries, waiting to be turned into something tasty. So, I started knitting a tank top...yeah a wool tank top. Strange but true.

My other fixation these days is berry picking. These things are popping up everywhere and so abundantly. Even though it has been 100 degrees we are out there picking away. It gets to be a compulsion, once you start something primal kicks in and you are possessed to grab every red jewel you see. And that's a lot. 

Every time we decide we've had enough and start walking away we spy another cluster that just begs picking.

Of course we were eating berries the entire time we were picking, but as soon as we got our bounty home we ate more. This time with whipped cream. They lasted a few days for fresh eating and then I made jam tarts from what was left. Looking at these pictures is giving me that urge to go picking again very soon.

Going Green

My "going green" isn't about the environment. I am talking about COLOR here. This is my answer to Gypsy Cowgirl's question/comment on my post about beets. She asked if I had any ideas for a natural green food coloring. She mentioned most natural sources of green being weak or muddy. I have tried everything from seaweed to spinach. The best thing I have found is green tea powder called "matcha". 

You can see from this cake that the green tea color is quite strong. I added about two teaspoons of the matcha to my dry ingredients. Since it's a powder it will not add extra liquid to your recipe which makes it great for things like shortbread, macarons, frostings, and whipped cream. Of course the more color you add, the more green tea flavor you will end up with. With this cake I wanted the tea flavor to go with the sweet adzuki bean filling. In japanese sweets this is a pretty typical pairing.

Beet Hand

I love beets, I eat quite a lot of them. So I often have "beet hand". Yes, I know there are ways to avoid this, but I usually don't. One day I was out and about running errands and I found myself hiding my beet hands. Why? Back in the 80's I had beet colored hair. It took quite a bit of work on my part to keep up that intense beet color. Believe me, I maintained it for years. People paint their nails shocking colors. Maybe one day beet hand will be all the rage.

We eat beets plain and simple, as here for part of our tea time snack. Of course we eat them in salads and sauteed with their greens in garlic. But last week I tried something new.

I was making a cake roll which I usually make with pumpkin puree. Not having any pumpkin,  I pureed a couple of small pre-cooked beets and threw them in the batter. Can you believe this amazing color?! So, beautiful and all natural. I thought it may not be too good, the batter tasted a little bit too "beety". I was wrong.

This cake was so good! It was delicious and in no way did it taste like veggies. The deep red color is intense. There is no butter or oil in this cake, but the beets make it very moist. I have never liked red velvet cake because I taste the bitter red food coloring. If you like the look of red cake, but hate the unhealthy dye this is certainly the way to go.

 My desire for more and more color went too far with this one. I was pickling beets and had some room in the jar. Not wanting to waste that lovely color (and flavor), I put in a few hard boiled eggs. Apparently I left them in to long, because...eek! Looks like some day-glo radioactive thing that should never be eaten. Not very appetizing.  Oh well, you can't experiment without having a few blunders. The pickled beets turned out pretty good anyway despite sharing their jar with the crazy eggs.