We love soup at our house. Not only is it a wonderful seasonal dish for fall, but it can be a delicious, nutritious and quick meal when fall and winter days are busy. By using tomato sauce and grated onion, we don’t need to use the blender. As a result, this cream of tomato soup is almost as easy as the congealed stuff from a can, but so much more delicious.
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Hungarian goulash, the real deal. In the Midwest, there is a dish called goulash that is slightly sweetened stewed tomatoes and ground beef mixed into elbow macaroni. Not to knock that dish, but it’s not Hungarian goulash.
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The weather is finally starting to feel like fall. I love that we can open the windows and freshen up the air in the house. But, I know it won’t be long before it gets too cold for that. The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a cold and snowy winter for us. Truly, I love that, as well! But being closed up in the house or work or school more means germs will be more readily shared. Today, we are going to make Fire Tonic from The Herbal Handbook for Homesteaders by Abby Artemesia. It takes several weeks of sitting in the pantry to be fully ready, so now’s the time to prepare our herbal medicine cabinet and get our immunity boosted.
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Raw winter squashes are beautiful, yummy and great nutrition on cold days. But they are hard and difficult to cut. Cutting, peeling, cubing… forget that! Frankly, if I’m going to be cooking all my meals at home, I prefer to find the easy way to do most things. Plus it’s fall and you need to be able to make healthy versions of all the pumpkin spice things without too much effort. So today, I offer the absolute easiest way to roast winter squash and the simplest squash casserole. Easy enough for a weeknight.
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We’ve talked about a number of ways to preserve foods when in season so we can enjoy them for months to come — canning, freezing, fermenting. Today we’ll talk about drying or dehydrating. You can dehydrate many foods for longer shelf-stable storage, even things you might not think of. Not only fruits and vegetables but also meat (think jerky), dairy or eggs. And there are a variety of ways to dehydrate foods using the sun, the air, the oven or a dehydrator. Today we’re making dried tomatoes stored in oil using our dehydrator.
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Peach season might be over where you are, but you still have plenty of time to make some delicious peachy recipes with the peaches you froze earlier in the season. This last episode in our peachy series of What’s in the Mason Jar gives us a sweet change to the usual. Peach corn salsa combines a few of summer’s special garden treats to make a sweet and spicy choice for chips or fish tacos, so great any time of the year.
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As we continue discovering what we can do with a box of peaches and revealing What’s in the Mason Jar, we arrive at Peach Barbecue Sauce. A little sweet, a little spicy and a little tangy.
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Fermenting foods has been a method of preservation for millennia. We often hear about gut health and lactobacilli and their role in our health. Making your own ferments at home is cheaper than buying them from the store and can be fairly easy. Yogurt, milk kefir, and raw cheese offer great options to build up the good gut bacteria. But what if you need a dairy-free option? Three popular ones are: 1. water kefir, which is fermented similar to milk kefir but with water and needs to be maintained and fed regularly, 2. kombucha which is tea fermented using a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) also needs to be maintained and fed regularly and 3. fermented produce, which is fresh produce placed in brine in an oxygen-deprived environment. That last one definitely makes the easiest dairy-free lacto ferments in my opinion!
Dairy-free lacto ferments — Swiss chard stems, cucumbers, carrots, and beans.
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Peach butter is like apple butter. But sunny and peachy keen.
Today’s recipe is slightly modified from Pick Your Own, a wonderful resource for great basic canning recipes as well as information on freezing produce and finding pick-your-own farms. However, we halved the recipe, reduced the sugar and added a little extra spice.
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We love peach jam at our house. Likewise, it’s a great way to preserve summer fruit to enjoy for months to come. The process is very similar for many fruits. Most canning recipes for fruit include adding sugar. We like to use a low-sugar recipe and pectin for jam making. This means we aren’t adding quite so much sugar to our diets and the jam has more of that delicious fruit flavor!
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