OCTOBERFEST!! FALL 2011

It’s fall and that can mean only one thing…Octoberfest!  Give us your best October food!  It could be something traditional to the famous German festival, it could be something to do with Halloween, or it could just be your favorite leaves-are-a-turnin’ meal.  There’s bound to be something about October that inspires you.  So, give us your best for the Octoberfest!  (This challenge will run through the end of November).

OCTOBERFEST!! FALL 2011

It’s fall and that can mean only one thing…Octoberfest!  Give us your best October food!  It could be something traditional to the famous German festival, it could be something to do with Halloween, or it could just be your favorite leaves-are-a-turnin’ meal.  There’s bound to be something about October that inspires you.  So, give us your best for the Octoberfest!  (This challenge will run through the end of November).

Pesto-Potato Salad

I'm just going to say RIGHT NOW that my cooking is typically healthy. However, if one had only my Cooking Challenge posts to go on, one might think I was always cooking things with low nutritional quotient and high "lazy" factor. (Oh geez, and I never did post my Lazy Pancakes entry. Well, some things may be best left undone, eh?)

This dish is really no different. It's embarrassingly easy. And somewhat high calorie. (Sly, I'd be intrigued for you to run your calorie evaluation on this dish. Kind of.) But you have NEVER tasted the likes of it before. And you'll want to. Trust me.

I got this recipe from fellow Cooking Challenger @theStephFisher's Fourth of July party 2 years ago. Her sister (Deborah Miller, PhD candidate) brought Pesto Potato Salad to the 4th of July picnic & I haven't stopped thinking about it since then.

This totally fits the "Local Foods" category of the Summer's Cooking Challenge. The potatoes and green beans are local, as are the basil leaves & garlic used in the pesto. And I know you're going to want to make it because it is So. Good. It best for taking to pot lucks, so you don't accidentally eat the whole bowl all alone. I have now made it three times this summer. (Granted, pesto is my favorite food, but still. 3 times!? I don't think we've had hamburgers three times this summer.)

Here are the ingredients:





Pesto (homemade)
Potatoes, chopped bite sized & boiled
Green Beans
Green Onions (I actually used real onions because I was out of green onions. Improvising is the name of the game!)
Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper
Garnish:
Pine Nuts left over from making the pesto & some ribbons of basil

I bought my potatoes from the Minnetrista Farmer's Market. My favorite are potatoes from Christopher Farms, a local all organic farm in Randolph County. Her booth is always beautiful! Their potatoes are expensive, but almost buttery-tasting. I have a whole passle of the purple potatoes. Aren't they beautiful?





The green beans are local, too. These were also bought at Farmer's Market from a farmer who's in Blackford County, just north of here.

I made the pesto for this batch, but I've used jarred pesto at other times. You can do that. Believe me, this Lazy Baker will NEVER judge you for taking a cooking shortcut. However, making your own pesto is easy. How's about I share the recipe with you below?

So seriously making Pesto Potato Salad is this easy:
1. Prepare the pesto if you're going to make it yourself (see below)
2. Boil the potatoes (Normally I wouldn't share the photo of boiling potatoes, but the water is almost blue!)





3. Chop up the green beans & green onions
4. Blanch the green beans by adding them to the pot with the potatoes for the last 2 or 3 minutes
5. rinse the potatoes/ green beans in cold water to stop them from cooking
6. Put potatoes, green beans, green onions in a bowl





7. Pour in a few swirls of olive oil to lubricate everything
8. Put pesto in, then stir gently so as the potatoes are not turned to mush.
9. Garnish with a handful of pine nuts & some ribbons of basil.
10. Do everyone a favor & put a little portion in a separate bowl. If you eat it out of the main bowl now, you might not be able to contain yourself.

FYI - I think this is best eaten while it's still warm from boiling the potatoes. Mmmmm. PS. I love that the potatoes retain the purple color after cooking! Looks beautiful!





In today's Two For One, here's the recipe for Traditional Pesto

The hardest part about making your own pesto is growing healthy, vibrant basil. If you have a brown thumb like me, it might seem out of reach to make homemade pesto. But to my good fortune, I live ridiculously close to Minnetrista Cultural Center where anyone can go pick herbs from their prolific herb garden. Prolific. And since I had the leftover ingredients from the last time I made pesto, all I needed to do was grab some basil. (And sometimes I do buy basil from the Christopher Farms lady, too. I'm pretty sure she has a gold thumb, to my brown one!)



Traditional Pesto
Blend the following until fully incorporated:
A little more basil leaves than you think
A great big handful of parmesean cheese
4 or five cloves of garlic
a good 1/3 to 1/2 cup of pine nuts (really you need pine nuts. they make it taste best)
a great big splash of olive oil
salt & pepper

It's simple. And really, just adjust the ingredients to taste.

Pesto-Potato Salad

I'm just going to say RIGHT NOW that my cooking is typically healthy. However, if one had only my Cooking Challenge posts to go on, one might think I was always cooking things with low nutritional quotient and high "lazy" factor. (Oh geez, and I never did post my Lazy Pancakes entry. Well, some things may be best left undone, eh?)

This dish is really no different. It's embarrassingly easy. And somewhat high calorie. (Sly, I'd be intrigued for you to run your calorie evaluation on this dish. Kind of.) But you have NEVER tasted the likes of it before. And you'll want to. Trust me.

I got this recipe from fellow Cooking Challenger @theStephFisher's Fourth of July party 2 years ago. Her sister (Deborah Miller, PhD candidate) brought Pesto Potato Salad to the 4th of July picnic & I haven't stopped thinking about it since then.

This totally fits the "Local Foods" category of the Summer's Cooking Challenge. The potatoes and green beans are local, as are the basil leaves & garlic used in the pesto. And I know you're going to want to make it because it is So. Good. It best for taking to pot lucks, so you don't accidentally eat the whole bowl all alone. I have now made it three times this summer. (Granted, pesto is my favorite food, but still. 3 times!? I don't think we've had hamburgers three times this summer.)

Here are the ingredients:





Pesto (homemade)
Potatoes, chopped bite sized & boiled
Green Beans
Green Onions (I actually used real onions because I was out of green onions. Improvising is the name of the game!)
Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper
Garnish:
Pine Nuts left over from making the pesto & some ribbons of basil

I bought my potatoes from the Minnetrista Farmer's Market. My favorite are potatoes from Christopher Farms, a local all organic farm in Randolph County. Her booth is always beautiful! Their potatoes are expensive, but almost buttery-tasting. I have a whole passle of the purple potatoes. Aren't they beautiful?





The green beans are local, too. These were also bought at Farmer's Market from a farmer who's in Blackford County, just north of here.

I made the pesto for this batch, but I've used jarred pesto at other times. You can do that. Believe me, this Lazy Baker will NEVER judge you for taking a cooking shortcut. However, making your own pesto is easy. How's about I share the recipe with you below?

So seriously making Pesto Potato Salad is this easy:
1. Prepare the pesto if you're going to make it yourself (see below)
2. Boil the potatoes (Normally I wouldn't share the photo of boiling potatoes, but the water is almost blue!)





3. Chop up the green beans & green onions
4. Blanch the green beans by adding them to the pot with the potatoes for the last 2 or 3 minutes
5. rinse the potatoes/ green beans in cold water to stop them from cooking
6. Put potatoes, green beans, green onions in a bowl





7. Pour in a few swirls of olive oil to lubricate everything
8. Put pesto in, then stir gently so as the potatoes are not turned to mush.
9. Garnish with a handful of pine nuts & some ribbons of basil.
10. Do everyone a favor & put a little portion in a separate bowl. If you eat it out of the main bowl now, you might not be able to contain yourself.

FYI - I think this is best eaten while it's still warm from boiling the potatoes. Mmmmm. PS. I love that the potatoes retain the purple color after cooking! Looks beautiful!





In today's Two For One, here's the recipe for Traditional Pesto

The hardest part about making your own pesto is growing healthy, vibrant basil. If you have a brown thumb like me, it might seem out of reach to make homemade pesto. But to my good fortune, I live ridiculously close to Minnetrista Cultural Center where anyone can go pick herbs from their prolific herb garden. Prolific. And since I had the leftover ingredients from the last time I made pesto, all I needed to do was grab some basil. (And sometimes I do buy basil from the Christopher Farms lady, too. I'm pretty sure she has a gold thumb, to my brown one!)



Traditional Pesto
Blend the following until fully incorporated:
A little more basil leaves than you think
A great big handful of parmesean cheese
4 or five cloves of garlic
a good 1/3 to 1/2 cup of pine nuts (really you need pine nuts. they make it taste best)
a great big splash of olive oil
salt & pepper

It's simple. And really, just adjust the ingredients to taste.

Easy Homemade Chicken PotPie

I think the intent of the "Pie" contest was for sweet summer pies, but in late August the weather cooled, and I started craving a savory PotPie. As luck would have it, I came home from work early one night & decided we (not the "Royal We", but the me + Little People- kind of "we") would all make a PotPie together for dinner.






(Check out the super-cute mug & super-cute aprons my MIL made! Adorbs!)

My recipe is based upon one from a favorite cookbook "The Six O'Clock Scramble" by Aviva Goldfarb (which is also a website/subscription meal planning website. Totally worth checking out!). Their recipe calls for pre-made pie crusts, but I decided to make it with crescent rolls pressed out, since that's what we had on hand.

I didn't exactly use a recipe, but my memory of the Scrambler's recipe, so I'm just going to tell you about the way I threw all this together.






Here are most of the ingredients (I didn't think to make this a blog post take the picture until I'd already begun cooking, so it's not totally accurate. I decided against pulling the other frozen food bags out of the trash can. ew. )

To begin:
Key for me: Make sure you have about 45 -50 minutes until you're going to be hungry. It takes a little while to throw this together & cook it up. Otherwise, you end up making a second dinner for everyone to eat while you're cooking the first dinner. Or maybe that's just me.

Preheat the oven per the crescent roll. On our case it was 350
2 packages of crescent rolls, each pressed into a round/squarish shape


Spray a pie pan with cooking spray.
Next lay the rolled & pressed crescent rolls (or pre-made pie crust) in the pie pan
(I rolled them out with a little handy-dandy Pampered Chef roller so I don't have to get out my full-sized rolling pin for projects like this. That tiny roller is a fave of my Little People!)

For the filling, start with the vegetables.
I just use what's on hand. In this case it was a mish-mash of fresh & frozen items.

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 carrots, peeled & cut in 1/2 rounds
the end of a bag of pre-cut onions, approx. 1/4 cup

I wanted the veggies to be the right consistency, so I pan fried up the garlic, onions and carrots in Pam Spray before I put them in the filling. (the flavor is much better this way!)

While the pan frying is doing it's carmelizing magic, start Stirring together the filling ingredients
I let the oldest Little Person open the cans, which he thought was AWESOME. (Isn't this post full of free parenting tips!? You're so lucky!)



one can of chicken
one can of cream of chicken lite
a healthy sprinkling of onion and garlic powder & pepper
a light dash of salt (the canned soup has plenty of sodium for the whole endevour)

Then add the frozen, raw & pan fried vegetables to the bowl.
I used various odds & ends of frozen vegetables


in our case it was
approx. 1 cup of corn frozen in early fall last year





the dregs of a bag of frozen lima beans,
a nice healthy portion of frozen peas

If you're really smart (like me) you'll let your kids dump this stuff into the bowl, so they'll think they "cooked," thereby making them more likely to actually eat the meal being prepared.
And stirring. These Little People really value stirring. My oldest even participated by opening the cans with the can opener. He's pretty tough.



At this point I assessed the consistency of the filling. I wished I had a second can of cream of chicken to add. Alas, like most of my wishes, it remained unfulfilled. Upon some pretty quick thinking, though, I realized I did have some plain yogurt & sour cream in the fridge. So, I added about a 1/2 a cup of one of those to this (I think it was sour cream, but don't quote me - we're not operating in exacts here, right!?) until the consistency seemed right for the filling. And the added bonus of more stirring! for my Little People. And with the yogurt sour cream addition, we thereby increase the health of the dish number of food groups included in the meal.

Next I added the filling to the first pie/crescent roll crust. (I did this unassisted. Some instances you can have TOO much help, you know?)

Then, I debated a bit on exactly HOW unhealthy i was going to make dinner. (When I hear my skinny friend describe the gazpacho dinner she's making, I think "oh, that's why she's skinny. She'd never use 2 packages of crescent rolls for a regular dinner!")
And then I went ahead and added that second set of crescent rolls to the top. (It was for purely asthetic reasons. I have to keep the blogosphere happy, right?)

And here's the final result:






(What a cheeser!)


And the real test? Three Little People ate all their vegetables. (Even the side dish of broccoli. Supermom, right here!)






...and then asked for seconds. Yum!

Easy Homemade Chicken PotPie

I think the intent of the "Pie" contest was for sweet summer pies, but in late August the weather cooled, and I started craving a savory PotPie. As luck would have it, I came home from work early one night & decided we (not the "Royal We", but the me + Little People- kind of "we") would all make a PotPie together for dinner.






(Check out the super-cute mug & super-cute aprons my MIL made! Adorbs!)

My recipe is based upon one from a favorite cookbook "The Six O'Clock Scramble" by Aviva Goldfarb (which is also a website/subscription meal planning website. Totally worth checking out!). Their recipe calls for pre-made pie crusts, but I decided to make it with crescent rolls pressed out, since that's what we had on hand.

I didn't exactly use a recipe, but my memory of the Scrambler's recipe, so I'm just going to tell you about the way I threw all this together.






Here are most of the ingredients (I didn't think to make this a blog post take the picture until I'd already begun cooking, so it's not totally accurate. I decided against pulling the other frozen food bags out of the trash can. ew. )

To begin:
Key for me: Make sure you have about 45 -50 minutes until you're going to be hungry. It takes a little while to throw this together & cook it up. Otherwise, you end up making a second dinner for everyone to eat while you're cooking the first dinner. Or maybe that's just me.

Preheat the oven per the crescent roll. On our case it was 350
2 packages of crescent rolls, each pressed into a round/squarish shape


Spray a pie pan with cooking spray.
Next lay the rolled & pressed crescent rolls (or pre-made pie crust) in the pie pan
(I rolled them out with a little handy-dandy Pampered Chef roller so I don't have to get out my full-sized rolling pin for projects like this. That tiny roller is a fave of my Little People!)

For the filling, start with the vegetables.
I just use what's on hand. In this case it was a mish-mash of fresh & frozen items.

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 carrots, peeled & cut in 1/2 rounds
the end of a bag of pre-cut onions, approx. 1/4 cup

I wanted the veggies to be the right consistency, so I pan fried up the garlic, onions and carrots in Pam Spray before I put them in the filling. (the flavor is much better this way!)

While the pan frying is doing it's carmelizing magic, start Stirring together the filling ingredients
I let the oldest Little Person open the cans, which he thought was AWESOME. (Isn't this post full of free parenting tips!? You're so lucky!)



one can of chicken
one can of cream of chicken lite
a healthy sprinkling of onion and garlic powder & pepper
a light dash of salt (the canned soup has plenty of sodium for the whole endevour)

Then add the frozen, raw & pan fried vegetables to the bowl.
I used various odds & ends of frozen vegetables


in our case it was
approx. 1 cup of corn frozen in early fall last year





the dregs of a bag of frozen lima beans,
a nice healthy portion of frozen peas

If you're really smart (like me) you'll let your kids dump this stuff into the bowl, so they'll think they "cooked," thereby making them more likely to actually eat the meal being prepared.
And stirring. These Little People really value stirring. My oldest even participated by opening the cans with the can opener. He's pretty tough.



At this point I assessed the consistency of the filling. I wished I had a second can of cream of chicken to add. Alas, like most of my wishes, it remained unfulfilled. Upon some pretty quick thinking, though, I realized I did have some plain yogurt & sour cream in the fridge. So, I added about a 1/2 a cup of one of those to this (I think it was sour cream, but don't quote me - we're not operating in exacts here, right!?) until the consistency seemed right for the filling. And the added bonus of more stirring! for my Little People. And with the yogurt sour cream addition, we thereby increase the health of the dish number of food groups included in the meal.

Next I added the filling to the first pie/crescent roll crust. (I did this unassisted. Some instances you can have TOO much help, you know?)

Then, I debated a bit on exactly HOW unhealthy i was going to make dinner. (When I hear my skinny friend describe the gazpacho dinner she's making, I think "oh, that's why she's skinny. She'd never use 2 packages of crescent rolls for a regular dinner!")
And then I went ahead and added that second set of crescent rolls to the top. (It was for purely asthetic reasons. I have to keep the blogosphere happy, right?)

And here's the final result:






(What a cheeser!)


And the real test? Three Little People ate all their vegetables. (Even the side dish of broccoli. Supermom, right here!)






...and then asked for seconds. Yum!