Tag Archives: recipe[dinner]

Cauliflower Soup!

by Katie | 2 Comments

I know what you’re thinking. Cauliflower soup? Where’s the pumpkin? Well, this chunky soup is packed with our favorite fall gourd.

Kidding! This wasn’t a post we were planning, but I cooked a pot of this soup on Tuesday and had to share it with everyone because it was so delicious. In addition to eating leftovers for lunch, Alex also requested it for breakfast the past couple of days!

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When the days get cooler, I crave all types of soups, and while I make most at home, I’ve always shied away from cheesy soups because I’ve had the bad luck getting the cheese to melt without creating a greasy and clumpy mess. I can’t say for sure what made the difference this time (following instructions, maybe?), but the soup turned out perfectly. I think I may use  this same base recipe for a broccoli version next.

The original recipe can be found here, and it was so perfect that I my changes were minor.

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Cauliflower Soup

Cauliflower Soup

Ingredients

  • 2 Tbsp olive oil
  • 1 medium carrot, diced
  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 1 celery stalk, diced
  • 1 medium cauliflower head, broken into florets
  • 2 1/2 cups water
  • 1 vegetable bouillon cube
  • 3 Tbsp butter
  • 3 Tbsp flour
  • 3/4 tsp salt
  • 2 cups 2% or whole milk
  • 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Instructions

  1. Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot over medium heat. Add the carrot, onion, and celery. Cook, stirring once in a while, until the onions are translucent (about 5 minutes).
  2. Add the cauliflower, water, and bouillon. Keep the soup at a gentle simmer for about 10-15 minutes as the vegetables cook.
  3. In a medium saucepan, heat the butter over medium-low heat. Whisk in the flour, salt, and pepper until smooth. Continue whisking and slowly pour in the milk. Whisk until smooth. Bring the milk to a gentle simmer over medium heat, stir once in a while, and cook for about 2 minutes until thickened. Reduce heat to low and stir in the cheese until melted.
  4. Stir the milk mixture into the soup and serve.
https://liveseasoned.com/cauliflower-soup/

We found that this soup reheats well, but doesn’t last long! I think this has started a little cauliflower kick in our house. Up next, this roasted cauliflower and garlic dip.

Pumpkin Chili

by Katie | Leave a comment

Pumpkin is our ingredient of the season. If you like this pumpkin chili, you might want to check out our stew and curry too!

Pumpkin Chili! In our house, chili was one of the first dinners that we learned to make. Our mom had a really simple, kid-friendly recipe (ground beef, canned beans and tomatoes, chili spice packet). Side note : can’t wait to teach Alex to make that one; look for that as a Cooking with Kids post in a couple of years. I was always really psyched to for chili night, but as I’ve grown, so have my tastes. Now I love a chili packed with fresh veggies, and fortunately for me, this chili has not one, but two types of pumpkin. Victory!

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I used two types of pumpkin because they each do something different for the dish. The fresh pumpkin holds its texture well when cooked, making it another vegetable that easy to identify in this chunky chili, while the pureed pumpkin adds a creamy texture to the chili liquid.

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Pumpkin Curry

by Katie | 4 Comments

Pumpkin is our ingredient of the season. We’re a big fan of pumpkin desserts (cookies, and popsicles, anyone?), but we’re not opposed to drinking our pumpkin or putting it on our face! Oh, and if you like the idea of a pumpkin soup, but don’t want the spice of a curry, check out this stew!

I’m trying to figure out how to introduce this pumpkin curry. Here are my options : 1. it’s so easy to make! 2. it’s delicious; everyone, including little Luc and Alex, loved it! 3. on a personal note, cooking curry brings back so many awesome memories from my time visiting Sarah in Thailand. All three introductions are true, and together, they have me wanting to make a pot of this curry every night. You should probably make it too.

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In Sarah’s post about Bangkok, she briefly mentioned the cooking class that we took together at Silom Thai Cooking School. It was such a great traveling experience. I love eating Thai food, and I’m happy to experiment with recipes I find online and in cookbooks, but it was reassuring to have experienced teachers show us how to make a handful of dishes and confirm that, as I’ll show you today, making a delicious curry is really that simple.

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Three Sisters Stew

by Katie | Leave a comment

Pumpkin is our ingredient of the season. After you’re done making this stew, serve a batch of these pumpkin cookies for dessert.

I may be taking some liberties in calling this three sisters stew, but whenever I see any combination of winter squash, corn, and beans, I think of the sisters. That combination of vegetables goes together in this savory stew as well as they grow together in the garden. What I’m trying to say is that this dish is fan-freaking-tastic. It’s delicious, is packed with vegetables, and pairs well with any number of meats. We served it with our favorite fried chicken, which is another recipe we shouldn’t keep to ourselves (look for it soon!).

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The recipe below is based off of this one, but with a few tweaks. For example, I can’t help but start a vegetable soup with diced onions and carrots, so we threw those in with the original recipe’s red pepper. I’m also a big fan of Rapunzel’s vegetable bouillon, so I substituted that in place of the chicken stock. Loving to garnish with avocados where ever we can (even in the form of avocado ice cream!), a few slices goes perfectly with this soup.

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In addition to those full-on changes to the recipe, I made a few basic swaps too. I used a can of fire-roasted tomatoes in place of the plum, and I used dried beans in place of canned. When it comes to beans, I almost never used canned. I’m just a fan of keeping dried beans in my pantry and then using our pressure cooker to soften them up on a moment’s notice. I’ll even make more than I need, using the extra for a dish later in the week or freezing them*. I also like that I can keep them in the cooker for a few extra minutes to create a cracked and really soft bean, making them even easier for Alex to eat.

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The recipe called for a garnish of toasted pumpkin seeds (if it didn’t I already had plans to add some – great minds!). I think we’re toasting pumpkin seeds on a weekly basis around here, primarily for adding to salads. I always toast them on the stovetop in a small cast iron pan. Put the pan over medium-high heat, add the pumpkin seeds and a sprinkle of salt. Toss them regularly and take them off the heat the moment they begin popping. Easy peasy… and like the beans you’ll want to make extra, but in this case the extra’s for snacking before dinner :-).

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If you’re like me, you may get the idea that you want to partially blend this soup when finished. It’s something about a soup with winter squash and beans that makes me want to grab the immersion blender. If you’re like that too, don’t do it. This recipe creates a nice, hearty vegetable soup, and I’m convinced that there’s nothing to gain by blending it. Make a batch and let me know what you think. In line with that thought, you’ll see that you have to add raw squash to the pot, which means you may have to spend some time peeling and chopping a raw pumpkin (unless you pick up a pack of the chopped and peeled butternut squash from Trader Joe’s!). At first I wanted to roast my pumpkin to make removing the flesh easier, but if I did that, then the pumpkin would be mushy and wouldn’t hold its shape well in the stew (a characteristic that’s great if you do plan on making a blended soup).

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Three Sisters Stew

Three Sisters Stew

Ingredients

  • olive oil
  • 1/2 large onion, diced
  • 1 large carrot, diced
  • 1/2 large red pepper, diced
  • 1 tsp cumin seeds
  • 2 cloves minced garlic
  • 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/8 tsp ground cloves
  • 2 cups frozen corn kernels
  • 2 cups winter squash (pumpkin, acorn, or butternut) cut into 3/4-inch dice
  • 1 can fire-roasted tomatoes
  • 2 cups vegetable broth
  • 2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed
  • toasted pumpkin seeds
  • sliced avocado

Instructions

  1. Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil until hot. Add the onion, carrot, and red pepper. Sauté for about 5 minutes or until tender and the onions are clear.
  2. Add the cumin seeds and sauté for a few seconds until you can smell their aroma. Add the garlic, cinnamon, and cloves, and sauté for a few more seconds.
  3. Add the corn, squash, tomatoes (with their juices), and the broth. Bring the stew to a boil, cover, and simmer for about 15 minutes or until the squash is almost tender.
  4. Add the beans, cover, and simmer for another 5 to 10 minutes.
  5. If you would like the stew to have more liquid, you can always add more broth.
  6. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
  7. Serve with a garnish of toasted pumpkin seeds and sliced avocado.
https://liveseasoned.com/three-sisters-stew/

There you have it! A veggie-packed stew for a cool fall day, and if you have kiddos, you can teach them about the three sisters (not the Schu sisters!) over the dinner table.

*this week my extra beans were used to make a tex-mex black been dish with green chilies and more red pepper, and then those leftovers were used to make huevos rancheros!

Butternut Squash Pasta

by Katie | 1 Comment

Pumpkin is our ingredient of the season. Today I went crazy and threw out the pumpkin for a butternut squash. Hope you don’t mind!

Today’s recipe for butternut squash pasta is absurdly easy, and it’s something that I find myself making every fall to usher in the season of squash. Come fall, I always have at least one butternut squash on the counter, so that’s what I used today, but this dish would be just as delicious if made with a sugar pumpkin. If you currently have a few squash on the counter, roast two squash today, eat one with your pasta, and use the other for our roasted root and squash soup.

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It’s been years since I’ve lived with roommates, and while sharing space has plenty of downsides, one thing I always loved was sharing the kitchen during meal times. I didn’t live in many situations where we actually shared meals (we were all on different schedules and often had different diets), but being in the kitchen while roommates were cooking often exposed me to new ideas, flavors, dishes, and stories. We all know it, time spent in the kitchen together is special, and it’s no surprise that guests/roommates/family will often congregate in the kitchen. This dish came from one of those random roommate moments in the kitchen.

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It was my first year living in Boston, there was a fall chill in the air, and my roommate had just roasted a squash. He didn’t have a particular dish in mind, but while the squash was roasting, he was also boiling pasta. The squash came out of the oven, a lightbulb went off in his head, and he combined the two. I don’t remember what else was in his dish, but I remember taking a bite and loving the combination of perfectly cooked pasta caked in the sweet squash with a dash of salt.

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Over the years, I’ve made some version of this dish every fall, and I’ve started to fall into a routine. I always slowly sauté the onions in some butter and olive oil until they are translucent, super soft, and amazingly sweet. After the roasted squash is added to the onions, I season it with a bit of dried thyme and garlic powder, and I use water from the cooking pasta to get a sauce consistency that is thin enough to easily mix with the pasta, but thick enough to stick in every nook and cranny.

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Once the sauce is ready, I stir in the cooked pasta and season it with salt. Before serving, there’s one more, absolutely crucial step : add a bit of freshly grated parmesan. The nutty and salty flavor of the parmesan does something amazing to the squash and pasta combination. It adds a deeper flavor (maybe it’s a touch of umami?) that rounds out each bite, and will have everyone at the table finishing their plate.

And speaking of finishing plates, now that one of my roommates is a toddler and the other just got his first teeth, I love making healthy food that they devour. As all moms know, you can’t go wrong with pasta, but you don’t necessarily love giving them plain noodles. This, my fellow moms, is a winning vegetable main course with my boys (granted, baby Luc can only eat the squash).

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We don’t have a formal recipe today, that would just ruin the experience of the casual weeknight meal shared by roommates hanging out in the kitchen after too many hours in the library.

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Lemon & Herb Salt

by Katie | Leave a comment

This past summer lemon was our ingredient of the season. We’ve created a dandy of an archive of lemon posts, and we’re still not done!

As September’s weather is straddling the line between summer and fall, we found that the combination of flavors in this bright and savory lemon & herb salt do the same!

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While doing some canning at the beach, I noticed this recipe in a copy of Preserving by the Pint and was immediately excited to try it. I love fresh herbs and am always looking for new ways to preserve their flavors as the plants fade in our late-summer garden. On the other hand, it’s taken me quite a while to appreciate lemon flavor in my savory dishes. Thank goodness I’ve come around, because this chicken dish is something I would not have made a few years ago, but we had it again last night for dinner (it’s just that good!). What I’m getting at is that a few years ago, I would have turned my nose up at this simple seasoning recipe, and what a shame it would have been. This seasoning is simple to make and adds a flavorful punch to a variety of savory dishes, making creative weeknight cooking a breeze.

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Preparing the seasoning requires just a bit of chopping and time. I did my chopping on a day when people were constantly coming in and out of the beach house, and every single person asked what was cooking and remarked that the kitchen smelled great. The chopping releases an amazing blend of aromas from the herbs, lemon zest, and garlic.

Once chopped, the mixture is spread out on a plate and left to dry for a couple of days. Since we were making this on the humid east coast in the middle of August, I put my plate in front of a fan to help with the drying process. If I were to make this at home in Colorado, the fan would be completely unnecessary because the air’s so dry. So use your discretion and help the drying process with a fan or warm oven if you’re in a high humidity environment.

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Lemon & Herb Salt

Lemon & Herb Salt

Ingredients

  • zest from 4 lemons
  • small bunch parsley
  • 3-4 sprigs of rosemary
  • 3 garlic cloves
  • 2 Tbsp coarse sea salt

Instructions

  1. Wash the parsley and rosemary and remove the leaves from the stems. This can be tedious with the parsley, but do the best you can, and a few stems are fine.
  2. Roughly chop the herbs. Add the zest and chop together with the herbs until well combined. Add the garlic and continue chopping. Add the salt, and... continue chopping until all ingredients are finely chopped.
  3. Spread the mixture on a plate and allow it to dry for at least 48 hours. It should be completely dry, with no sign of moisture.
  4. Store in a jar and use anywhere you would like to add a bit of flavored salt.
https://liveseasoned.com/lemon-herb-salt/

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After the seasoning has dried, you can use it on any variety of dishes. One night we tried it on our roasted summer veggies, which were a combination of summer squash, onions, potatoes, and corn. They were delicious, but I didn’t *love* the flavor of lemon on the vegetables (can’t win them all!). The next night we sprinkled the seasoning on and in some fish freshly caught by our pop. I included a pat of butter inside each fish because they were on the leaner side. Our mom loved the fish so much that she made sure to confirm that I “took a picture for the blog”. Everyone loved the fish, and it couldn’t have been easier to make.

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I have to admit that I never buy seasoned salt or herb mixes from the spice section. Instead, I sprinkle on the combination of individual herbs I want for any particular dish. That said, this seasoned salt was so easy to make, and it’s motivated me to experiment with the rest of the fresh herbs in our garden to develop a number of custom salts that will let me preserve those flavors and use them all winter long.

Roasted Lamb Shank with Fruit and Herbs

by Katie | 2 Comments

Lemon is our ingredient of the season! Today we’re cooking up a savory dish, and if you like this, you may want to check out our lemon pasta and chicken with preserved lemons.

The night before leaving for our big trip east, I roasted lamb shanks as a going away dinner. We were going to be away from Calder for about two weeks, and in just a few more days, Sarah’s off to Nepal! So something special was definitely in order.

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Since we loved the creativity and flavor of the chicken with preserved lemons, Calder said we should just make that again (it was that good!). Instead, I decided to test another recipe from the Tagines & Couscous cookbook, and I’m so happy to report that we hit another home run!

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Chicken with Preserved Lemons

by Katie | Leave a comment

Lemon is our ingredient of the season! So far we’ve used it in a buckle, in bars, in a savory pasta, popsicles, and in the shower.

If there’s one thing making this chicken with preserved lemons dish confirmed, it’s that Calder and I fall hard for main dishes with a mix strong flavors. For example, this dish calls for fresh and preserved lemons, fresh ginger, garlic, onions, olives, and cilantro (wow!). I would never dream of putting that many flavors together on my own, and I wouldn’t have the confidence to assume that they would go well with chicken. BUT when flipping through cookbooks, that’s just the sort of edgy combination that jumps out and gets me excited to try a new recipe. Such was the scene last week when I pulled our Tagines & Couscous cookbook off the shelf.

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Stop. Do you know what a tagine (also spelled tajine) is? It was only in the past few years that I learned, and then we received a beautiful tagine as a wedding gift. A tagine is a piece of cookware from North Africa that’s made of clay and is sometimes glazed or painted. It’s made of two pieces, the bottom is flat with low sides, the top is cone-shaped. The top’s shape is meant to allow condensation to form and drip back down into the bottom of the dish. While tagines are traditionally used to cook over hot coals, they can also be used on traditional stovetops and in the ovens.

Funny thing – ours is so beautiful that I still haven’t gotten up the courage to actually use it. I’m scared it’ll break! Luckily, even if you don’t have a tagine, you can still make many of the recipes that call for them using a heavy-bottomed pot, like a dutch oven. That’s what I did for this dish.

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Lemon Ricotta Pasta

by Katie | 2 Comments

Lemon is our ingredient of the season! So far we’ve used it in a buckle, in bars, and in the shower. Oh, and there are two on my counter waiting for our next project!

After all of our desserts and drinks in the lemon category, are you ready to try something savory? This Lemon Ricotta Pasta is the perfect savory use of lemon. The citrus takes a pasta dish that could feel heavy when mixed with two cheeses and lightens it up, perfect for a summer dinner on the deck.

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As you’ll see, this dish is also crazy easy to make.  After an early morning flight back to Colorado yesterday, our family is still in recovery mode and trying to get back into a routine. It’s weeks like these when I like to cut myself a break and keep dinner simple while still actually cooking because I find that even simple dinners are key to helping us regain a routine.

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Cashew Lime Crema and Sweet Potato Fries {Vegan Option}

by Sarah | 2 Comments

Nuts are our ingredient of the season. We’ve been using them for sweets, drinks, snack bars and savory condiments!

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Happy Monday errrrr Wednesday!  We’re not the type to make excuses, but we’ve been busy!   This past week I spent my days in Boulder with Katie, Calder and their two boys.  It was such a blast! I can’t even think about all the fun I had or I might cry.  I’m not sure when my tears started flowing so freely, but I cry A LOT these days.  Usually it’s about happy moments or cute videos, but sometimes I tear up when people win on Wheel of Fortune. Yeah, what the hell is happening to me?! Anyway, when I think about how much fun I had this past week and how cute the kiddos are and how far away we live from each other I want to cry, but I won’t because I’m in control, right? Right.  

If you want to feel in control like me, you’ll totally make this lime crema because it’s the easiest and tastiest dipping sauce on BOTH sides of the Mississippi and as you’re shoveling spoonfuls into your mouth you’ll think “Holy cow that was easy. I rock. I’m a cuisine queen. I’m in control of my supper and my life.” At least that’s how my thoughts played out as I was dipping my sweet potato fries.   Oh and lime crema is adaptable too!  It’s basically an equation: cashews, liquid, salt and seasoning.  That liquid could be any type of milk, vegan or not, or you could use water; I promise it will taste just as creamy with water.  It’s amazing. Don’t ask questions.

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