Simple Cranberry Apple Slaw

Simple and Colorful Winter Salad

Recipe adapted from Paleo Approach Cookbook

In prepping for a recent dinner party I was challenged by a recipe that took a lot of space, time, and effort: Carbonada en Zapallon. Like many holiday recipes, it requires the entire kitchen for a prolonged period of time. I discovered this simple side dish to add a fresh, seasonal crunch to an otherwise meaty, stick-to-the-ribs menu. Bonuses: only 4 ingredients plus salt and pepper, and it keeps well and can be served with leftovers.  A green salad just can’t compete.

Dauphin Easy Apple Soufflé

Try it with Cream, or Not

Recipe adapted from Simplicity from a Monastery Kitchen

I’m on an apple roll this season. After spiced poached apples, old school apple cake, and pear crisp with apples substituted for pears, I’m taking it to the next level with a more esoteric recipe. From an upstate New York monastery, it's Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Loutourette's Dauphin Easy Apple Soufflé. Dauphin was the dynastic title  of the French heirs apparent during the 14^th-19^th centuries. It also translates to dolphin. What exactly Dauphin has to do with the apple soufflé remains a monastic mystery.

Old School Apple Cake

Apple Cake for All!

Recipe from Sunset Light & Healthy

It’s officially the holiday season. Let there be cake! I’ve tried many cakes in the quest to recreate my Gram’s Apple Cake, with a notable divergence into Amen Farms Apple Cake, a delicious go-to recipe. Old school apple cake differs from my past posts in that it contains raisins and nuts. I call it a 70’s recipe because it’s from Sunset Light & Healthy cookbook—and what’s considered healthy these days is different from when the book was published. This recipe is low fat and free of saturated fats. It is not low carb, low sugar, gluten free, dairy free or egg free. It tastes perfect without frosting, though you could sprinkle it with powdered sugar and cinnamon, or decorate it with edible poinsettias, roses, or glitter stars for holiday festivities.

Apples Poached with Spices

Option #1: Serve Chilled with Mint Leaves

Recipe from Unidentified Clipping

Between Halloween candy overindulgence and Thanksgiving pie decadence is a peaceful season where simple autumn desserts give our bodies a break as well as a lift.  While raw persimmons, pears, and pomegranates conveniently fill the everyday dessert bill, baked or poached apples provide more elegant treats for special occasions. And with very little fuss—10 minutes of prep and less than an hour of cooking time. Plus, an aromatic apple and spice smell issues forth from the kitchen, imbuing the entire household with an iconic fragrance of autumn.

Sausage and Apple Stuffed Acorn Squash

Autumnal Fare

Recipe adapted from Casalegno Family Farm

One of my favorite things about Farmers’ Markets is meeting the people behind the food. It’s especially rewarding to meet a vendor who owns and operates a farm while raising two children and working a day job. Marissa Casalegno and her husband Matt, are the fifth Casalegno Farm generation. They work day and night to expand their farm and preserve heirloom veggies. Marissa gave me this recipe, featuring Casalegno Family Farm’s fantastic winter squash and green apples. Sausage and spices compliment sweet squash and sour apples beautifully.

Cranberry Apple Crisp with Gluten Free Option

With Optional Pecans and Cream

Recipe adapted from Simply in Season

 

Crisps are a perfect destination for not-perfect fruit. This year our tree produced many apples, as usual, but due to drought they were small, hard, dry, and a bit sour. Not pleasant for snacks, but cut up and mixed with traditional green baking apples and seasonal cranberries, they cooked up into a blog-worthy dessert. Crisps have three other benefits: they’re relatively healthy, they’re easily adaptable to accommodate gluten-free guests and on-hand topping ingredients, and they’re simple to make. Plus, everyone seems to love them.

Turkey, Apple, and Basil Sausage Burgers

Basil, Apple, Sweet Onion and Spices Compliment Meat

Recipe adapted from Smart Cooking the Costco Way

Happy 2015! During the final weeks of 2014 we enjoyed unseasonably warm weather in California. Our garden basil continued to produce strongly flavored if somewhat peaked-looking leaves. Right before the first cold snap, I harvested the remaining leaves and wanted to use them in a seasonal recipe for an oddly warm December. I found this recipe for mini-burgers in a book left over from our library’s book sale, which I purchased for just a buck. Right now you can purchase this cookbook, which has a surprising number of intriguing recipes, for $.01 (ten times less than I paid) at Amazon. I didn’t need another cookbook, but finding this wonderfully unusual combination of basil and sweet apple in a deliciously spiced burger was well worth my impulse buy.

Eve’s Pudding

Eve's Pudding: Apples and Victoria Sponge

Recipe Adapted from Mrs. Beeton’s Cookbook

My traveler friends warned me about this. After spending a month in the UK, American foods just don’t seem right. I miss the crispy sausage rolls sold on London streets, the soothing Lancashire hotpots served by my cousin, the fresh scones with real clotted cream, and the many delicious puddings (desserts). Inspired to create, I searched a very old edition of Mrs. Beeton’s Family Cookbook and discovered Eve’s Pudding. It’s a light Victoria sponge cake baked atop gently seasoned stewed apples. The “Eve” moniker is apparently a reference to temptation by apple.

Citrus Pomegranate Fruit Salad

Spring Colors with Last Harvest Fruits

Recipe adapted from Best of Sunset

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. As Seasonal Eating readers know, I’m crazy about retro cookbooks. The latest addition to my collection was published ‘way back in 1992. The Best of Sunset is a compilation of winning recipes from Sunset magazine’s not-so-distant past. Yet since Sunset has been serving up menu ideas since 1898, I suspect that this fruit salad recipe was first published earlier—around 1980 or a bit before. It’s from the years when honey-Dijon dressings suddenly appeared on menus everywhere, but we hadn’t learned to specify which “salad oil” they were made with. This salad is lightly dressed and even my friend Rox (not a big fan of mustard) rated it thumbs up.

Hot Red Cabbage Slaw

Bright Winter Hot Slaw

Recipe adapted from Midwest Gardener’s Cookbook

It’s the shortest day of the year, so time is precious. Are you ready for the fastest, simplest, recipe ever blogged at Seasonal Eating? How about a delicious side dish that’s bright purple-red and requires just a microwave and about 20 minutes to prepare? A recipe that’s cheap and uses few ingredients, yet provides vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, fiber, and possible protection from cancer? That requires only a knife and cutting board plus two bowls, one of which can be used for serving? Yes, friends, this recipe is almost too good to be true. And did I mention that it’s delicious?

Applesauce Multigrain or Oatmeal Muffins

Fragrant, Crunchy Breakfast Treat

Recipe adapted from Trader Joe’s

Muffins are simple to make, because you just throw the ingredients together, scoop them into the pans, and bake, right? Yes and no. Making good muffins is easy if you practice three things: mix the wet ingredients thoroughly, mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, but then mix together wet and dry ingredients only until barely moistened. Follow this method, and your muffins will be light, evenly textured, and moist on the inside and crispy on the top. Overmix wet and dry ingredients, and your muffins can be tough, gluey, and/or dense. They will resist rising and look sad compared with what they might have been. Take heed and learn from my mistakes!

Apple Raisin Pecan Stuffed Delicata Squash

Fabulous Fruit and Nut Stuffing

Gluten Free Recipe by Robin

Two years ago I had no idea what delicata squash were, although I received them in my CSA farm share during fall deliveries. Delicatas are delightfully light-textured and sweet oblong-shaped winter squash. The skin is edible, but some people (my husband for example) don't want to eat it. So it's best to cook delicata so that the skin can be removed should someone choose to.  My maple glazed delicata squash rings were a big hit around Thanksgiving last year. This year baskets of apples overflowing onto kitchen counters gave me sudden inspiration to slice the delicatas in the opposite direction and stuff them with something akin to apple pie filling.

Gram’s Apple Cake

With Whipped Cream for Me

Recipe by Gram and Robin

Have you ever been on a culinary quest that lasted for years? Trying to find an elusive recipe that you tasted once or enjoyed as a child, trying to recreate that recipe but not getting it quite right year after year? Giving up, then recommitting, looking at old cookbooks, hoping for divine intervention and, when all else fails, searching the internet? Such was my quest for my grandmother’s apple cake. With a vivid flavor and texture in mind, and recipes in hand, I made many delicious apple cakes (and one notable failure) that weren’t anything like Gram’s. Until two days ago, when a hole in the space-time continuum to 1968 opened up and I saw the light. How fortunate that this happened before the dinner party.

Lowfat Apple Turnovers with Phyllo Dough

Choice of Toppings

Recipe from The Cooking Decade

A lowfat apple turnover sounds too good to be true, or at least too unusual to be delicious. However, in The Cooking Decade, a collection of tried and true family recipes compiled by my sister Chris, it is marked “Outstanding.” I’m not a phyllo dough expert, in fact have only used it twice to make spanakopita, many years ago. Though this recipe is easiest if you have some phyllo finesse, it is truly hard to ruin. The original recipe calls for cutting the phyllo into long equal strips and stacking them up. Easier said than done for phyllo novices with limited counter space. So on my second try, I cut the dough crosswise, to make shorter, wider sheets. Then I stacked two manageable-sized sheets and folded them. This seemed an easier way to make even dough strips, with fewer torn edges. Also, the turnovers were fewer and plumper, hardly a disadvantage.

Applesauce Oatmeal Muffins

Healthful Alternative

Recipe by Robin

Muffins aren’t what they used to be. These days they’re supersized, and available almost anywhere. But what commercially produced muffins have gained in size they’ve lost in nutrition. Even muffins produced without preservatives or hydrogenated fats are loaded with sugar and enough excess oil to stain your napkin and coat your fingertips. Whole grains have been replaced with refined flour. Artificial color and flavor are not unusual. Plus, they’re expensive. Let’s get back to basics with a low fat fall harvest muffin that’s full of whole grain goodness along with the natural moistness of no-sugar applesauce!

Apple Crisp

Traditional and Updated Crisps

Recipe by Mom, Fannie Farmer, and Robin

Of all the seasons, autumn makes me most nostalgic for my mother. It’s the season she died, and also the season in which she seemed most alive. She loved the variety of New England seasons, but the crispness of fall days invigorated her and inspired her to activity. When I was young, she’d take my sister and I to local farms for apples and fresh-pressed cider. We’d visit the farm animals and perhaps pick out a few pumpkins or some Indian corn to decorate at home. Once she bought us tiny woven cornucopias filled with mini candies. My memories of those times are surrounded with the golden glow of October sun in an unbelievably deep blue sky.

Mom’s Applesauce

Mom's Applesauce, Smooth Texture

Recipe by Mom

“Dull November brings the blast, then the leaves are whirling fast.”

Sara Coleridge, only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote these words in 1834, part of her poem “The Months.” I remember reading this in my childhood almanac, and it inspired my lifelong interest in changing seasons throughout the annual cycle. Indeed, November has stripped our fruit trees and even weeping willows of their leaves. Cloudy, cool, and grey, today is what my sister Chris calls an Applesauce Day. November is usually full of these, as is February.

Cider Braised Cabbage and Apples

Braised Kapusta & Apples in Cider

Adapted from Bon Appetit Recipe

In the beginning of the 2011 CSA season, I set a goal of exploring my Polish roots through cooking. Kapusta (cabbage) is a Polish staple food, and I know that my ancestors cooked kapusta and onions with caraway seeds. The triple apple addition in this recipe (apples, cider, and vinegar) compliments the cabbage by adding sweetness, texture, and a bit of tartness.

Applesauce Cake

Slice of a Classic

Recipe Inspired by the Boston Cooking School Cookbook

Applesauce cake has been around for years. I remember my grandmother making it back in the 1950s, but it's been baked since the 19th century. I was nostalgic for this classic seasonal recipe, especially since I had a huge amount of homemade applesauce after the apple u-pick a couple weeks back. I began with a recipe from the 1942 edition of the Boston Cooking School Cookbook, but wanted to make it lighter and moister. I borrowed an idea from the 1975 Joy of Cooking, and added an egg. I also used more applesauce, baking soda, and raisins.

Apple Cranberry Crisp

Fruits of the Season

Recipe from Cooking by the Seasons

Happy Halloween All! It is said that at this time of year the veil between the living and the dead grows thinner. Christians are preparing to celebrate All Saints and All Souls day to honor the dead and pray for their safe journey to heaven. In Mexico, folks will be celebrating Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) by building altars to honor the dead, decorating graveyards with flowers, and inviting spirits of those passed to join the celebratory gathering of family and friends. Participants cast an eye towards the living as well, acknowledging the fact that we will all pass into spirit someday. Similar celebrations occur in Brazil, Spain, and parts of Asia and Africa. I’m building a memorial altar to honor my dear friend Joy and my father, who both passed away this year.