lynks to my world
Last month, I was invited by my lovely friend Sarah to join a group of ladies to attend (and eventually host) a sort of rotating dinner party. The evenings are called Delectable Dinners and the first two evenings have been full of interesting women, great conversation, many photos of cats, and delicious food. The concept is quite low-key and very flexible to different people’s hosting preferences: the hostess gets to decide if she’d like to cook the full dinner, have a pot-luck, or even go out to a restaurant if that’s more her style.
So far, both Dinners have been pot-lucks and I’ve been really impressed with the interesting dishes these ladies bring. I brought a g-free apple pie to the first dinner (it turned out even tastier than the first one) and my contribution to Sunday’s dinner was Cumin Seed Roasted Cauliflower with Yoghurt. I stayed true to the recipe this time, but I used purple cauliflower from Riverbend Gardens. It was beautiful raw and the purple actually intensified when it was cooked. I quite liked the dish and I’ll definitely make it again, but I was really blown away by the rest of the menu: a guacamole with extra veggies, roasted beet hummus, stuffed mushroom caps, broccoli salad, a quinoa/tomato/parmesan bake, bacon-wrapped pork tenderloing (seriously!), and for dessert? Homemade cinnamon rolls and pavlova. Yeah, we eat like that.
I really love seeing (and tasting!) the creativity of the dishes, but the best part of these evenings is the conversation with a really interesting group of women. Most are people I didn’t know before Sarah’s first dinner and I am really happy to be getting to know such great people.
When autumn hits I crave cozy, warm foods and soup is one of my favourites. There’s just something so appealing about a big bowl of goodness on a blustery day. Soup is also a great way to process some of your harvest bounty for the coming cold months. I generally make big batches and freeze the bulk of it – I’m a big fan of cooking once to eat for a bunch of meals. All of the recipes are basically doubled so there’s enough to freeze. Adjust your amounts accordingly!
This month I made 3 different soups: Roasted Corn and Scallop Chowder, Roasted Tomato and Roasted Garlic Soup, and Quick and Easy Borscht. Everything was made with at least some ingredients from EOGG and the tomatoes came from my parents’ garden. There’s a lot of recipe in this post, so I’ll just get to it:
A few weeks ago, Adam posted photos of his dinner that had me salivating they looked so good. He kindly passed on the link for the recipe he’d used and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Yesterday I finally had all the ingredients together, so I made it for dinner and it was delicious! I’m not good at following recipes exactly to the letter, so I made a few minor modifications. This is a seriously delicious, one-dish, hearty autumn meal that I think you should try at your earliest convenience. Thanks Adam and France for this great recipe!
Roasted Eggplant with Warm Chorizo Chickpea Salad (adapted from Beyond The Peel)
Preheat the oven to 400° F. Slice the eggplant in half, salt the cut sides, and set aside. Remove the sausages from their casings and break up into the bottom of a casserole dish. Add the onion, garlic, tomatoes, and potatoes to the casserole (distributed evenly). Place the rosemary and thyme in the dish. Squeeze the eggplant out over the sink, rinse off the excess salt, and pat dry. Lay the eggplant, cut side down, over the mixture in the casserole dish. Bake for 40 minutes or until the eggplant starts to collapse – stir the mixture once, halfway through the cooking time.
While the salad is baking, put together the vinaigrette by whisking together the olive oil, vinegar, and mustard. When the salad has finished baking, remove the eggplant and set aside. Add the chickpeas and the vinaigrette and toss everything together until well coated.
I eat 90% of my meals at home out of bowls, so I served this by scooping out half the eggplant and topping it with about a quarter of the salad mixture. So good!
October was a big month for pies. I volunteered to make our family’s Thanksgiving pies (one pumpkin and one chocolate), I made another g-free apple for a pot luck you’ll hear about in a future post, but this one gets to be the October pie: a single-top-crust pie full of juicy and delicious plums.
October 2011 Pie #3: Plum One-Crust Pie (modified from Foodland Ontario)
Beautiful ripe plums!
My maternal grandmother is from Texas and she uses a host of terms that I identify specifically with her. “Putting up” is one of them – I’m not sure how widely the term is used, but it basically means canning. My grandmother would put up jams, pickles, and tomato sauces in the late summer and autumn so the family would have yummy things through the winter. My mom also canned when I was a kid, but by the time I was in junior high, she was too busy to put up much.
I have a dear friend who has Celiac Disease, which means she went to a bunch of pot-lucks in August and September where beautiful fruit pies were on offer, but she couldn’t partake. I usually bake gifts for people’s birthday’s so I asked Sarah what kind of pie she would like and she requested apple. I have never explored gluten-free baking before, so I did a lot of internet searching. There were a number of recipes that called for mixtures of flours that I don’t usually keep on hand and some included ingredients, like xanthan gum, that I would have to track down.
This is one of the best local-focused recipes I’ve made recently. I made it up in an effort to use up some of the ingredients in my kitchen that were getting to that “Must Eat Now” stage. It’s super easy and could easily be adapted with other vegetables that need to be used up. It is also somewhat inspired by this recipe from Smitten Kitchen (I seem to be working my way through her blog…I think it’s the pictures. They always make me hungry).
I promised to post this recipe two weeks ago, but better late than never! 🙂
marilynk 