Christmas Dinner Contribution

Well, don't i have egg on my face? I thought for sure that i had posted my favorite side dish recipe for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner in the past, but i was wrong. No old post to re-post for me! This is the basic jist, however:

Patti's Sweet Potatoes (or squash)

This dish is best prepared the day ahead.

• 1 squash or sweet pie pumpkin OR
• 6 or so yams/ sweet potatoes
• Half gallon of apple cider
• Whole cloves/ cinnamon/ salt/ pepper/ paprika/ cayenne
• Splash cream sherry
• Olive oil or butter

Cut squash or yams into evenish sized cubes. Toss in melted butter or olive oil with savory seasonings. Roast at 400 until cooked through, at least 30 minutes- stirring occasionally. In the meantime, pour cider into a medium sized pot with the cloves and Cinnamon. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and continue to cook down until it has reduced to at least 1/3 of its original volume. 
Once squash/yams are cooked to your liking, place into an appropriately sized baking dish and cover with the cider. Toss a few times, cover and put in the bottom of the fridge (or the really cold garage). 
To serve:
Toss potatoes/squash a few times to work the cider juice around all the veg and add a drizzle of cream sherry. Place in the oven at 350 to reheat. Serve hot!

This dish is my stand by side dish to bring to any large meal. You can top it with some spiced pecans if you want to get fancier, but this is very tasty just by itself. I love this dish because you can cook it ahead of time and slowly reheat it in between other dishes being baked. Much better than canned sweet potatoes with marshmallows, don't you think??

What's your favorite side dish to bring to a family meal?

Brunch Recipes #2: Skillet Taters and Two Fritattas

A. I never know if fritatta is spelled frittatta or fritatta. I'm going with fritatta. Both get little red mispelling lines underneath. But so does misspelling. haha.
okay, focus, miranda.



I had a great soux chef for our family brunch: my husband who was dear enough to travel 6 hours to meet my ENTIRE family and then help me stir potatoes for half an hour. What a guy. The potatoes were easy, just required a lot of stirring. You can sub any seasonings you like, add more oil, more onions, whatever. They're easy. I make fritattas about once a week or so, so i've gotten 'back of my hand' with them too, tossing in whatever i have on hand. The main thing to remember about the fritatta: 375 degrees for about 20 minutes, until bubbling, puffed, and fully cooked in the center.

I got to use my grandma's mother's cast iron pans, making the fritattas that much more special.

I cooked two, factoring my grandmother's inability to digest onions or garlic. I also made her her own little dish of onion/garlic free potatoes. Birthday girl gets a taste of everything!

Potatoes

• A bunch of local potatoes, red and purple
• Smoked paprika
• Chopped onion and garlic
• Fresh herbs: rosemary, sage
• Salt, pepper
• Whatever else you want!

Oil the pan and skillet fry those taters. It was more of a 'move and flip to cook evenly' than a fry - but you get the picture. I could have roasted them in the oven, but it was being used for muffins and fritattas. I think we cooked them for at least 30 minutes.



Fritatta 1

• 5-6 eggs
• Roasted pumpkin flesh
• Dash milk
• Fresh herbs: rosemary, sage, basil
• Local champagne cheese

Fritatta 2

• Maybe a full dozen eggs
• Splash milk
• Sauteed veg
• Broccoli
• Garlic
• Onion
• Fresh, chopped tomatoes (from my Austin garden)
• Herbs: rosemary, sage, basil
• Salt, pepper
• Sliced onion for garnish
• Local cheddar cheese

For both fritattas:
Microwave a big potato and slice very thin. Meantime sautee the onions, garlic with seasonings adding the broccoli last. Remove from pan. Grease pan(s) and lay down the potatoes evenly like a bottom crust. Whip up the eggs with their splashes milk and their veggies/ seasoning. Pour half over the potato crust, layer cheese evenly as a middle layer topping with remaining egg. Cook at 375 until done - the bigger one took about 30 minutes, the smaller about 20. I liked putting the cheese in a sliced layer instead of shredding into the egg mixture because you got a layer type goo yum instead of invisible cheese calories hiding in the mix.

Pretty easy and very delicious. I liked cooking the fritattas in the cast iron because it kept them fairly warm up til breakfast time. Test for doneness when you the center puffing up - they're done when they firmly resist pressure, or a fork peeked inside shows cooked egg with no goo (other than cheese goo).

I think i did a decent job putting together a fairly seasonal/locally sourced brunch menu. I did cook some ham that came from Kansas City, and the fruit salad was bananas and canned fruit :(   but the rest of the 'from scratch' goodies at least were as local as i could get.

What would you have made your family for a special birthday brunch?

Brunch Recipes #1: Muffins and Applesauce

I was born in Connecticut. I then lived in Oregon for most of my life. Both of these locations provided me with seasonal bounties of apples in the Autumn. I am still accostomed to this and bought about 30 dollars worth of apples last fall due to the lack of bounty here in the southland. Not this year - i found some sense. Luckily this year also found me IN the northeast to enjoy the proper apple bounty in its very best location and season. My cousin was kind enough to bring a bushel of Maccoun (i always misspell that) apples to Montauk for me to turn into a delicious sauce.

Had i continued cooking the apples down, i'd have made a finer and denser apple 'butter' but i had socializing, beach walking, and stone collecting to do, so i settled for a simple sauce. Making applesauce is the easiest thing to do - so if you have a kiddo, or just really like applesauce (who doesn't?) make it yourself. Especially if you live in apple country, there is NO excuse to purchase pre made sauce, filled with preservatives, sugar, or just questionably sourced apples. Make your own!

It's easy:
Take a bushel of apples. Peel and core. You could even leave the peels on. I peel, but don't mind little stragglers of skin. Compost the peels and cores - keep the cores away from your doggies as apple seeds are poisonous.
Plop the apples chunked into a big pot along with a pinch of freshly ground cinnamon and cloves, cover and bring to a boil on high. Stir occasionally and keep heat at a medium/high until the apples start to fall apart into mush. Stir some more, maybe add a tiny pinch of brown sugar if you must - tiny pinch only! Keep covered and simmer on low for a few hours.

I think i simmered mine for about 4 hours or so. Nothing smells better than a simmering pot of apple goodness and it does all the work for you.

Now for the muffins. These were delicious and one particular muffin was taken hostage by my grandmother as her 'security muffin' (this story is too fantastic not to mention but too silly to type out fully here). Needless to say, Grandma Viv really liked her muffin and had THREE with her brunch. I think i had at least 2 and a half. These muffins aren't too sweet, they're wholesome without being dense, they complimented the applesauce well and would be great with breakfast or dinner.
I got the recipe from the Harried Homemaker and changed only the flour and the sugar - i used half whole wheat half all purpose flours, and half Rapadura and half granulated sugars. I doubled the recipe to make a little over 24 muffins and calculated the recipe to make about 145 calorie muffins.
These are not your gooey, sticky, sugary, fluffy, cupcakey blueberry muffins. They're biscuity while still being very muffiny and just darned scrumptious! I'll be making these regularly and with whatever berry is in season. Perhaps some cranberry muffins will be coming with me to Thanksgiving this year instead of the pumpkin bread pudding i'd planned.

• 1/4 C melted butter
• 2 cup flour - half all purpose, half white whole wheat
• 1/3 cup sugar - half rapadura, half granulated
• 1 T baking powder
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 egg beaten
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup berries  - i used frozen blueberries

Combine dry, make a well and add mixed up wet ingredients and blend within 25-20 strokes. Fold in berries last and cook in greased muffin tins at 425 for about 15-20 minutes. Mine went about 17 and i switched top to bottom, bottom to top half way through: thus burning my hand. First thing in the morning. Shesh.

A note on the prep: i mixed the dry ingredients here in Austin and packed them all up in an empty flour bag. TSA didn't mind my travelling with cucumbers, tomatoes, muffin mix, or cheddar cheese - though they were curious of my bag of rocks on the return voyage. Prepping the mix in my own bowls with my own measuring cups brought me sanity and mixing in the wet stuff in Montauk was a cinch. I baked these guys fresh for the table the morning of the brunch and all were scarfed down by cousin and uncle alike.

Cousin James and Grandma Viv ready to pounce on the feast.

 Yum. I want to eat more muffin and applesauce right now. NOW. Dangit, Austin and no apples. Next fall, maybe i will get the sweet taste of apple in my mouth again. For now, i anxiously await my friend's persimmon tree to ripen and be turned into jam by me.

Back tomorrow with the rest of the menu.

This post seen at Simple Lives Thursday