gratuitous food post
It's that time again! In this round we have pumpkin pasties, some Thanksgiving dishes (with recipes!), an apple tart, some tomato chutney and a birthday cake. No pictures of Meaty Meat Dishes this time!
01. Pumpkin Pasties
We decided that it was only fitting for the residents of Casa de Fangirl to arrive at the premiere of HP7/1 not just decked out in HP regalia and carrying wands, but also bearing gifts of fannish treats to smuggle into the movie theatre. Mary whipped up some butterbeer, which we drank ourselves at home because it didn't really transport well to the theatre, while I decided I would use my most favorite pastry dough in the history of the world to create some pumpkin pasties, then, with flagrant disregard for movie theatre rules, and with great disdain for overpriced movie snacks, bundle up ziplock baggies of our delicious contraband and stuff them into my Slytherin bag. Who needs an invisibility cloak? Pssh.
Anyway, after a gigglefit over pasties shaped like pumpkins on the Twitter, I got down to business, chilling some butter, flour and salt in the freezer while I pondered what I would do for the pumpkin filling. I ended up using a modified version of Almost Everyone's Pumpkin Pie Recipe, ie, the recipe that lives on the back of every can of Libby's Packed Pumpkin. I feel like I cheated a little with this recipe, because I used canned pumpkin instead of really doing this from scratch, but the pumpkin selection down here was not so good this year, so I think my sins can be forgiven. This version had no cinnamon, because we had one moviegoer with a terrible cinnamon allergy and one moviegoer with a terrible aversion to cinnamon, and I may have been rocking the green and silver, but my southern hospitality still trumps the tiny voice of my inner Slytherin every single time. I don't feel like the recipe suffered at all from the lack of cinnamon-- it still had cloves and ginger, after all-- and judging by the way these things got gobbled up, nobody else thought so, either.
02. Thanksgiving extravaganza: potato casserole and crockpot dressing
You may or may not remember that I got marooned on Thanksgiving, due to a freak storm and nervous parents. Well, when the weather hands you freezing rain, I say, make your own damn meal, and that is what I did.
Potato Casserole
I could eat this every single day. It's good that I don't, but I could. This has been a holiday staple of my family's for pretty much my whole life. We used to just eat it at Christmas, but lately it's been making an appearance at Thanksgiving, too (yes indeed, right alongside homemade mashed potatoes, because in my family we like to let our inner Hedonism Bots have free reign on the holidays). It's cheesy baked potatoes in a bowl. How can that be wrong?
It is, like all casseroles, composed of a vegetable, some onion, condensed soup and cheese. Add butter and sour cream and voila: heaven. It's also fairly easy to make this as a one-bowl dish, which I did, because I am supremely lazy economical and just mix it all up in the casserole dish.
Potato Casserole
Ingredients
2lbs. frozen potatoes (I like shoestring) or 2lbs. freshly grated potatoes (I'd go with Idaho myself, though I'm drooling a little at the thought of Yukon Golds, I admit)
1/2 c. melted butter
1 8oz. carton sour cream
1 can cream of chicken soup (or cream of mushroom, if you're going vegetarian-- it's just as yummy that way)
1 small-medium onion, chopped (white or yellow)
2 cups shredded cheddar
salt and pepper to taste
Thaw potatoes (if they need thawing). Heat oven to 350. Put ingredients in a 9x13 baking dish and stir. (Or if you're not as terribly lazy as me: put them all in a large bowl and stir, then pour into the baking dish.) Cook for about 45 minutes, or until potatoes are nice and soft and cheese is melted and bubbly. Serve warm & enjoy!
Crockpot Dressing
I don't know where you stand on the stuffing v. dressing debate, but to me, stuffing goes inside the bird (or tofurkey, or vegan field roast, or what-have-you), while dressing goes on the side. This recipe would probably make perfectly delicious stuffing, but I'm calling it dressing, because I cook it in a crockpot and it never even sees a bird until it gets dumped onto my plate next to some steaming slices of turkey.
Like the casserole, this is a seriously easy thing to make. Take ingredients. Dump into slow cooker. Stir. Top with butter. Wait a few hours. That's it!
Here is a thing you may want to know about this dressing: it has celery. HOWEVER. I have made this dressing for people who claim to hate celery in dressing, and then had them eat multiple servings of it, all the while going, "I don't even like celery, BUT I CANNOT STOP EATING THIS DRESSING." Trufax.
Finally, if you're at all interested, I whipped up a vegan version of this for thegingerhood, and honestly, it tasted a whole damn lot like The Real Thing, which is something I very rarely say about vegan cooking in general. That's not to say I don't enjoy many vegan-friendly products and dishes. I do! And I make them quite often. But while I think it tastes good, I don't think it tastes the same. This is pretty similar, though, so if you're trying to kick the meat habit but you have a yen for dressing of your very own on Thanksgiving, this is a pretty good way to go.
Crockpot Dressing, Omnivore's Version:
Ingredients
1 8" pan of cornbread (for this I usually say In Jiffy Mix I Trust, because it's so very easy)
8 slices of bread
4 eggs
1/2 c. onion, finely chopped
1-2 celery stalks, finely chopped
1 1/2 tbs. rubbed sage
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
2 cans cream of chicken soup
2 cans chicken broth
2 tbs. butter
Crumble breads in large mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients except butter. Pour into crock-pot/slow-cooker. Dot with butter. Cover & cook, stirring very occasionally, on low for 3-4 hours or on high for 2 hours.
I haven't actually tested the vegetarian version of this, but I would probably just use Not Chik'n cubes as a sub for the broth, omit the celery, and use 2 cans of cream of celery as a sub for the cream of chicken. Or maybe 1 can of cream of celery and some silken tofu, which I can say actually works really, really well here, since I've tried it in the vegan version. Normally I fall back on cream of mushroom as my default replacement for cream of chicken in vegetarian recipes, but here I feel like it would be a little odd.
Crockpot Dressing, Vegan's Version:
Ingredients
8 slices rice bread
1 8" pan vegan-friendly cornbread (I made mine with sweet cornbread made with half flour/ half cornmeal, almond milk, beet sugar and vegan-friendly oil instead of shortening or egg, and it worked fine)
Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 a box of silken tofu
Vegan butter sub-- I used Earth Balance's non-soy version
2 cups vegetable broth (I used my favorite Better Than Bouillon, as always, though I think that this would be absolutely fantastic with a leek broth)
1-2 stalks celery, finely chopped
1/2 c. onion, finely chopped
1 1/2 tbs. rubbed sage
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
Crumble breads in large mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients except butter substitute. Pour into crock-pot/slow-cooker. Dot with butter substitute. Cover & cook, stirring very occasionally, on low for 2-3 hours or on high for 1.
03. Organic Apple Tart
This was for the all-organic potluck this year-- my contribution last year was some delicious vegan pizzas on cornmeal crust, but this year we ended up short on desserts, and right in the middle of apple season! That's what I call serendipity.
04. Madras Tomato Chutney
A few weeks ago, we went with hugahorrible, ranee42 and her ~*~fiance~*~ to the amazing new local Indian restaurant, which was as always COMPLETELY DELICIOUS IN ALL WAYS. The only bad thing about eating there is that we can't eat there every day, so for at least a week after we go, I end up staring at whatever we have in the pantry and wishing it could just be a delicious plate of vegetable korma or OH MY GOD THAT BHENDI MASALA. But sadly, it's a bit of schlep to the restaurant, which is actually in a different city-- I only say "local" because it's not like it's hours away-- and not really economically feasible for us to eat there every single day. Sometimes, we have to do this on our own.
Thanks to ranee42, we had some dosa mix on hand, and Mary set to work with that. While she did all the heavy lifting for this meal, whipping up some truly delightful masala for our dosai, I got the fun of making chutney, and oh, it was tasty. Best of all, Mary said this tasted remarkably like the tomato chutney her host mom served her, which I think is probably the highest compliment this recipe could receive.
05. Best Birthday Cake + Vanilla Frosting
Friday night, we celebrated our friend Hot Rod's birthday. She wanted a fun night out at one our many awesome pizzerias followed by TRON, and that is exactly what we did, plus cake, because I cannot go to someone's birthday party without bringing cake. I had it in my head that I would also make TRON cookies, but that didn't happen. Not for lack of will, mind you, or from a failed baking experiment, just for lack of time.
I did manage to make a pretty two-layer yellow cake with vanilla buttercream frosting, all from scratch. So I feel like the Birthday Night Out was a success, overall. My ancient oven decided to hate me a little with this one, and the outside of the cake got a little too brown for my liking. That's probably what I get for gabbing to my BFF on the phone while I'm supposed to be buttering cake pans, but in my defense, he is OMG ENGAGED to a wonderful guy, so my failure to multitask was probably due to all of the oohing and ahhing I was doing. (Yes, of course I am already plotting what I food I will bring to the engagement party, why would you ask?)
This frosting was nicely spreadable, and overall it was a good complement to the yellow cake. Chocolate frosting would have been far better, but the birthday girl doesn't really like chocolate cakes or chocolate on cakes, and when it comes to her cake: what the birthday girl wants, the birthday girl gets.
01. Pumpkin Pasties
We decided that it was only fitting for the residents of Casa de Fangirl to arrive at the premiere of HP7/1 not just decked out in HP regalia and carrying wands, but also bearing gifts of fannish treats to smuggle into the movie theatre. Mary whipped up some butterbeer, which we drank ourselves at home because it didn't really transport well to the theatre, while I decided I would use my most favorite pastry dough in the history of the world to create some pumpkin pasties, then, with flagrant disregard for movie theatre rules, and with great disdain for overpriced movie snacks, bundle up ziplock baggies of our delicious contraband and stuff them into my Slytherin bag. Who needs an invisibility cloak? Pssh.
Anyway, after a gigglefit over pasties shaped like pumpkins on the Twitter, I got down to business, chilling some butter, flour and salt in the freezer while I pondered what I would do for the pumpkin filling. I ended up using a modified version of Almost Everyone's Pumpkin Pie Recipe, ie, the recipe that lives on the back of every can of Libby's Packed Pumpkin. I feel like I cheated a little with this recipe, because I used canned pumpkin instead of really doing this from scratch, but the pumpkin selection down here was not so good this year, so I think my sins can be forgiven. This version had no cinnamon, because we had one moviegoer with a terrible cinnamon allergy and one moviegoer with a terrible aversion to cinnamon, and I may have been rocking the green and silver, but my southern hospitality still trumps the tiny voice of my inner Slytherin every single time. I don't feel like the recipe suffered at all from the lack of cinnamon-- it still had cloves and ginger, after all-- and judging by the way these things got gobbled up, nobody else thought so, either.
02. Thanksgiving extravaganza: potato casserole and crockpot dressing
You may or may not remember that I got marooned on Thanksgiving, due to a freak storm and nervous parents. Well, when the weather hands you freezing rain, I say, make your own damn meal, and that is what I did.
Potato Casserole
I could eat this every single day. It's good that I don't, but I could. This has been a holiday staple of my family's for pretty much my whole life. We used to just eat it at Christmas, but lately it's been making an appearance at Thanksgiving, too (yes indeed, right alongside homemade mashed potatoes, because in my family we like to let our inner Hedonism Bots have free reign on the holidays). It's cheesy baked potatoes in a bowl. How can that be wrong?
It is, like all casseroles, composed of a vegetable, some onion, condensed soup and cheese. Add butter and sour cream and voila: heaven. It's also fairly easy to make this as a one-bowl dish, which I did, because I am supremely lazy economical and just mix it all up in the casserole dish.
Potato Casserole
Ingredients
2lbs. frozen potatoes (I like shoestring) or 2lbs. freshly grated potatoes (I'd go with Idaho myself, though I'm drooling a little at the thought of Yukon Golds, I admit)
1/2 c. melted butter
1 8oz. carton sour cream
1 can cream of chicken soup (or cream of mushroom, if you're going vegetarian-- it's just as yummy that way)
1 small-medium onion, chopped (white or yellow)
2 cups shredded cheddar
salt and pepper to taste
Thaw potatoes (if they need thawing). Heat oven to 350. Put ingredients in a 9x13 baking dish and stir. (Or if you're not as terribly lazy as me: put them all in a large bowl and stir, then pour into the baking dish.) Cook for about 45 minutes, or until potatoes are nice and soft and cheese is melted and bubbly. Serve warm & enjoy!
Crockpot Dressing
I don't know where you stand on the stuffing v. dressing debate, but to me, stuffing goes inside the bird (or tofurkey, or vegan field roast, or what-have-you), while dressing goes on the side. This recipe would probably make perfectly delicious stuffing, but I'm calling it dressing, because I cook it in a crockpot and it never even sees a bird until it gets dumped onto my plate next to some steaming slices of turkey.
Like the casserole, this is a seriously easy thing to make. Take ingredients. Dump into slow cooker. Stir. Top with butter. Wait a few hours. That's it!
Here is a thing you may want to know about this dressing: it has celery. HOWEVER. I have made this dressing for people who claim to hate celery in dressing, and then had them eat multiple servings of it, all the while going, "I don't even like celery, BUT I CANNOT STOP EATING THIS DRESSING." Trufax.
Finally, if you're at all interested, I whipped up a vegan version of this for thegingerhood, and honestly, it tasted a whole damn lot like The Real Thing, which is something I very rarely say about vegan cooking in general. That's not to say I don't enjoy many vegan-friendly products and dishes. I do! And I make them quite often. But while I think it tastes good, I don't think it tastes the same. This is pretty similar, though, so if you're trying to kick the meat habit but you have a yen for dressing of your very own on Thanksgiving, this is a pretty good way to go.
Crockpot Dressing, Omnivore's Version:
Ingredients
1 8" pan of cornbread (for this I usually say In Jiffy Mix I Trust, because it's so very easy)
8 slices of bread
4 eggs
1/2 c. onion, finely chopped
1-2 celery stalks, finely chopped
1 1/2 tbs. rubbed sage
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
2 cans cream of chicken soup
2 cans chicken broth
2 tbs. butter
Crumble breads in large mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients except butter. Pour into crock-pot/slow-cooker. Dot with butter. Cover & cook, stirring very occasionally, on low for 3-4 hours or on high for 2 hours.
I haven't actually tested the vegetarian version of this, but I would probably just use Not Chik'n cubes as a sub for the broth, omit the celery, and use 2 cans of cream of celery as a sub for the cream of chicken. Or maybe 1 can of cream of celery and some silken tofu, which I can say actually works really, really well here, since I've tried it in the vegan version. Normally I fall back on cream of mushroom as my default replacement for cream of chicken in vegetarian recipes, but here I feel like it would be a little odd.
Crockpot Dressing, Vegan's Version:
Ingredients
8 slices rice bread
1 8" pan vegan-friendly cornbread (I made mine with sweet cornbread made with half flour/ half cornmeal, almond milk, beet sugar and vegan-friendly oil instead of shortening or egg, and it worked fine)
Somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 a box of silken tofu
Vegan butter sub-- I used Earth Balance's non-soy version
2 cups vegetable broth (I used my favorite Better Than Bouillon, as always, though I think that this would be absolutely fantastic with a leek broth)
1-2 stalks celery, finely chopped
1/2 c. onion, finely chopped
1 1/2 tbs. rubbed sage
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
Crumble breads in large mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients except butter substitute. Pour into crock-pot/slow-cooker. Dot with butter substitute. Cover & cook, stirring very occasionally, on low for 2-3 hours or on high for 1.
03. Organic Apple Tart
This was for the all-organic potluck this year-- my contribution last year was some delicious vegan pizzas on cornmeal crust, but this year we ended up short on desserts, and right in the middle of apple season! That's what I call serendipity.
04. Madras Tomato Chutney
A few weeks ago, we went with hugahorrible, ranee42 and her ~*~fiance~*~ to the amazing new local Indian restaurant, which was as always COMPLETELY DELICIOUS IN ALL WAYS. The only bad thing about eating there is that we can't eat there every day, so for at least a week after we go, I end up staring at whatever we have in the pantry and wishing it could just be a delicious plate of vegetable korma or OH MY GOD THAT BHENDI MASALA. But sadly, it's a bit of schlep to the restaurant, which is actually in a different city-- I only say "local" because it's not like it's hours away-- and not really economically feasible for us to eat there every single day. Sometimes, we have to do this on our own.
Thanks to ranee42, we had some dosa mix on hand, and Mary set to work with that. While she did all the heavy lifting for this meal, whipping up some truly delightful masala for our dosai, I got the fun of making chutney, and oh, it was tasty. Best of all, Mary said this tasted remarkably like the tomato chutney her host mom served her, which I think is probably the highest compliment this recipe could receive.
05. Best Birthday Cake + Vanilla Frosting
Friday night, we celebrated our friend Hot Rod's birthday. She wanted a fun night out at one our many awesome pizzerias followed by TRON, and that is exactly what we did, plus cake, because I cannot go to someone's birthday party without bringing cake. I had it in my head that I would also make TRON cookies, but that didn't happen. Not for lack of will, mind you, or from a failed baking experiment, just for lack of time.
I did manage to make a pretty two-layer yellow cake with vanilla buttercream frosting, all from scratch. So I feel like the Birthday Night Out was a success, overall. My ancient oven decided to hate me a little with this one, and the outside of the cake got a little too brown for my liking. That's probably what I get for gabbing to my BFF on the phone while I'm supposed to be buttering cake pans, but in my defense, he is OMG ENGAGED to a wonderful guy, so my failure to multitask was probably due to all of the oohing and ahhing I was doing. (Yes, of course I am already plotting what I food I will bring to the engagement party, why would you ask?)
This frosting was nicely spreadable, and overall it was a good complement to the yellow cake. Chocolate frosting would have been far better, but the birthday girl doesn't really like chocolate cakes or chocolate on cakes, and when it comes to her cake: what the birthday girl wants, the birthday girl gets.