Cheesy Baked Potato Disks

Onion and garlic tops and some mixed lettuce greens

During the spring, summer, and fall months of the year, it is very easy to eat something picked from our own garden every single day. In the winter, that task gets a little trickier.  Our winter gardens were a little lackluster this year - we didn't have a lot of success with our greens but our onion and garlic stayed strong all winter long. Throughout the winter, the kids and I could go out to the garden and snip off some onion or garlic greens to add a little backyard flavor to our dinner. If you never let the onion develop flowers at the top and "go to seed" you can keep cutting back your onions and letting them regrow for up to two years - they are known as "cut and come agains." 

Snip, snip. 

For this recipe, we used locally grown North Carolina white potatoes and onion greens snipped from our back yard ... the ingredients in between were purchased at our local Harris Teeter! This recipe is so simple and reasonably healthy - I guarantee your kids will love it. Think of this as a healthier (and quicker) version of a baked stuffed potato or stuffed potato skins. 

Ready to be cooked...

 Ingredients: 

White potatoes, scrubbed and sliced (1/2 inch thick) 

1 T. Butter, slightly softened

Shredded cheese (about 1 cup)

Cooked and crumbled bacon (I used 4 slices)

Chopped scallions or onion tops

Directions: 

I used two VERY large white potatoes for this recipe and the slices just about filled a 9 x 12 cookie sheet. Lay potato disks on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. (Parchment paper is not a necessity but it makes clean-up easier and there will be no sticking.) Lightly butter each potato disk. Sprinkle with shredded cheese, crumbled bacon, and green onions. 

Bake at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes. 

The kids picked up their little potato disks and simply ate them - no forks involved. If your table is more formal than ours, these cut up very easily with a butter knife.  Enjoy! 

Crunchy Potato Crusted Tilapia

My son regularly asks me, "Mom, is this an experiment?" Chances are pretty good that it usually is! Luckily, my kiddos are adventurous eaters and since they were very little I fed them propaganda such as "Did you know that you might need to try something 10 times before you really know that you like it?" This works very well - I can almost always safely ask how many times do you think you have tried (insert new food) and we have never really ever approached the number 10 before they simply develop a taste for it.

After we moved to Charlotte a little over a year ago, my son requested that we serve food only one time in any month. He was absolutely serious about this. He is a quirky kid - he could tell you the last time I made him potato soup (last November!), or how many times he was allowed to have chocolate milk in January (4). I guess if your child is going to make a strange food request, this ones seems pretty reasonable. It's a good thing I love to cook! Although my little guy is not so rigid these days about duplicating a meal in a month, his challenge helped me broaden my cooking repertoire. This quick and easy recipe for fish is both a meal that we have not had in the past thirty-one days and, of course, an experiment.

The last piece of tilapia!

Tilapia was on sale this week at Harris Teeter for almost half the regular price - how could I resist? I ordered a pound of fish - 3 good sized filets - and they served 2 adults and 3 small children very well for about $4.

Ingredients: 

1 pound tilapia
2 large spoonfuls mayonnaise
2 teaspoons of spicy brown mustard
1/2 cup or so of dried mashed potato flakes
Creole seasoning (optional)

Directions: 

About to be cooked...

Combine the mayonnaise and the mustard in a small bowl. Add Creole seasoning if you wish (I love Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning). Using a spoon, coat both sides of the fish in the mayo-mustard combo. Dredge the fish in the potato flakes - generously coat the fish well on both sides!

Cook at 400 degrees in a 9 x 12 pan for 20 minutes.

* The flakes will get crispy on top and the potato flakes on the bottom of the fish create a sort of mashed potato base. Delicious! We served our fish with a large amount of steamed veggies and did not even bother with an additional starch. Enjoy!!

Blueberry and Meyer Lemon Quick Bread

I am a little late to the Meyer lemon craze - until last week I hadn't cooked a thing with them and, quite honestly, I wasn't even sure what everyone was talking about! And then I saw them on sale at Earth Fare ... 10 for $2 - how could I say no? With spring fast approaching, I am starting to clear out some of my prized freezer possessions (like some of the delicious North Carolina blueberries I purchased weekly by the gallon last summer) - lemons and blueberries - a delicious combination!

Meyer lemons seem to be beloved because they are slightly sweeter and juicier than traditional lemons. In fact, I read that they are a citrus fruit that is actually a cross between a traditional lemon and a mandarin orange. For this recipe, I used the juice and zest of one lemon in the bread and the juice of the other lemon in the glaze and then I tossed the lemon rinds into the garbage disposal to freshen it up a bit. My kitchen smelled so clean!

For this recipe, much like my poppy seed bread recipe, you must make the lemon glaze to go over the bread or it isn't nearly as delicious as it could be! The glaze consists of 2 ingredients - confectioner's sugar and lemon juice. It is too easy to skip this last step...

Ingredients for the Bread:

3 tablespoons butter, melted
1 cup oil (I used canola)
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
The juice from one Meyer lemon
The zest from one Meyer lemon (only the yellow! don't get the white rind)

4 eggs

2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup milk
1 cup blueberries (lightly tossed in flour)

Directions: 

1. Combine the first six ingredients - butter, oil, sugar, salt, lemon juice, and lemon zest - in a large stand mixer.
2. Add the four eggs. Mix it again until the eggs are well incorporated into the batter.
3. Add the flour and baking powder. Mix again.
4. Add the milk. The batter will become very thin as you mix in the milk.
5. Toss in the blueberries but do not use the stand mixer! Gently fold the blueberries into the batter.
6. Pour batter between 2 greased loaf pans and cook at 350 degrees for an hour until the top has a golden color.

Lemon Glaze:

Squeeze the juice from one lemon and add about 1/2 cup of confectioner's sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir well so that all of the sugar has dissolved into the lemon juice. Heat just until boiling and then stir and cook it on medium for about 2 minutes. Pour warm glaze over warm bread.  I like to prick my bread with  a fork dozens of times before I pour the glaze over it so that the glaze seeps into the top layer of bread! Delicious!

** Tip for squeezing lemons... I have been told that if you warm a lemon in a microwave for 20 seconds, you can get more juice from it. I am not sure about that - I never tried it. However, I seem to find that if you roll the lemon around on a hard surface with the palm of your hand before you cut it in half to squeeze it, that results in more juice! 

** Why toss the blueberries in flour? If you toss the blueberries lightly in the flour, they will not sink to the bottom of your bread while the bread is cooking. Neat trick! If the blueberries are frozen, keep them frozen until you toss them in flour and then into the batter. Also, I only used 1 cup of blueberries in this recipe, but you could easily use 2 cups.

Super Simple Potato Salad

Although spring has not sprung in many parts of the country, we are certainly feeling some spring fever here in Charlotte! I don't want to tell my family how warm it was here today (over 70 degrees! - shh!). We certainly took full advantage of the great weather and planned an easy meal - burgers on the grill accompanied by potato salad and baked beans. Delicious!

Preparing the potatoes: 

This potato salad is so easy! To save time later, I cooked the potatoes while the kids were eating lunch so they would be cooled and ready to turn into a quick salad at dinner time.

Cooking potatoes for potato salad does not take too long and if you have eager helpers, hand them a peeler and let them do the "hard work." I roughly peeled the last of my local potatoes using a knife (I didn't bother with a veggie peeler today) and chopped the potatoes into large chunks. Place the potatoes in a large pot and cover with cold water until the water is about two inches higher than the potatoes. Estimate one potato per person to gauge the amount of potatoes you need to prepare - we used six. Bring the water to a boil and cook on high for about 20 minutes until the potatoes are fork-tender. (Can you easily poke it with a fork?) Remove from the heat and drain in a colander. Set aside to cool until you are ready to prepare your potato salad.  (If you don't have enough time to cool your potatoes, warm potato salad tastes great, too!)

Additional Ingredients:  

Garlic and onion in our garden

2 tablespoons spicy brown mustard
1/4 cup mayonnaise
Handful of chopped scallions or onion and garlic greens from your garden
1 stalk celery, diced (optional)
1 or 2 hard boiled eggs, chopped (optional)
2 slices bacon, chopped (optional)
Salt and pepper

Directions: 

1. Place cooled potatoes in a large bowl and season with salt and pepper.
2. Add mustard and mayonnaise and gently toss potatoes to evenly coat.
3. Add additional ingredients - my family loves chopped egg, celery, and onion greens snipped fresh from the garden. And, since everything is better with bacon, if you have some on hand, add it in! 

The great part about this recipe is that it is very easy to adapt - do you like your potato salad creamier? Add more mayo! Love more crunch? Add another stalk of celery! Enjoy!

Cornbread Croutons (Gluten Free!)

My children love croutons! Admittedly, I love croutons as well. I think they are a fabulous snack all by themselves or tossed into a soup or salad. Most people don't realize how easy it is to make their own croutons. Throughout the week, we eat many meatless meals "just because" but during Lent our family never eats meat on Fridays so I try to get creative with easy and vegetarian Friday meals. This past week, I decided to serve Black Bean Soup with Cornbread Croutons. It was a great combination.

For this "recipe" I used leftover corn bread, sliced it into crouton sized pieces, drizzled them with olive oil and spices, and toasted them in the oven. So easy! So delicious! Bob's Red Mill makes a great gluten free Cornbread Flour Mix and one package makes a large amount of corn bread - even too much for the six of us to eat. A few days after I made a batch of corn bread I still had about 1/2 of it remaining. Croutons are best made from bread that is not fresh - croutons are the perfect use for bread that is a few days old.

Directions: Cut bread into bite-sized pieces, put into a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil. Season with your favorite spices - you can use sea salt, crushed garlic, pepper, or nothing at all. Gently toss the bread using your hands or two large spoons. Spread bread on a cookie pan (I used parchment paper to prevent sticking.) Cook at 375 degrees for about 20 to 25 minutes. Using a spatula, roughly turn the bread about halfway through the cooking time. If your oven seems to run hot, you might be done by 20 minutes.  

Sloppy Joes and Sauteed Greens

My husband has been asking me to make Sloppy Joes for weeks! This past Sunday was one of those days that just screamed for comfort food. My husband worked all weekend and it rained for two straight days (kids and I were stir-crazy!) so by the time dinner rolled around at the end of a very long weekend, I needed something quick, easy, and satisfying. This definitely did the trick.

For Sloppy Joes, you can use any type of ground meat you like - or even a combination. I like to use grass fed beef from Proffitt Family Farms (located in Kings Mountain, NC) or the grass fed beef from the Hickory Nut Gap Farm (located in Asheville, NC). If I miss the farmers market and have run out of meat in my freezer, I am able to buy the beef from Hickory Nut Gap Farm because it is sold at Earth Fare - my fabulous healthy grocery store right down the street. This weekend, I decided to use a pound of grass fed beef and a 1/2 pound of ground white turkey. (I knew that this amount of meat would be too much for our dinner but I was hoping there would be leftovers so I could make a Sloppy Joe inspired baked ziti later in the week.)

My husband would argue that since there are tomatoes in the Sloppy Joes that counts as a vegetable. I obviously disagree. A really easy side dish to accompany the Sloppy Joes is sauteed greens. I recently found some delicious Savannah Mustard Greens at the Atherton Farmers Market and they tasted amazing. They had a slightly peppery taste to it - not bitter at all - and it looked like it would be very easy to prepare.

I grabbed one red onion and decided to use that in both the Sloppy Joes and the sauteed greens. I used half of a large onion and sliced it thinly for the greens and then chopped about 1/4 of the onion to put in the dutch oven while I was browning the beef and turkey. If you are uninterrupted by dogs needing to be fed, children needing milk, etc. this meal really should only take you about 15 minutes to prepare. However, even with the distractions of familial chaos, I had everything on the table in about 20 to 25 minutes - success!

Ingredients for the Sloppy Joes: 

1 pound (or so) ground grass fed beef
1/4 onion, chopped
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon paprika
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/3 cup ketchup
1/2 can diced tomatoes and green chiles

Brown the ground meat with the onions - using a spoon or spatula to crumble the meat into small pieces. Add remaining ingredients. Stir well until combined. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about 10 minutes. My husband likes to serve his Sloppy Joes on a bun. For my daughter, we serve hers plain or over gluten free cornbread.Yum!

Ingredients for Sauteed Savannah Mustard Greens:

A bunch of greens - washed
1/2 red onion, sliced thinly
A generous drizzle of Olive oil and a few shakes of Kosher Salt

I like to grab my bunch of greens and cut them into rough strips about an inch thick - I think this makes it easier for kids to eat them. Toss the greens and onion into the olive oil that has already started to heat up. Bring the heat to medium, stir the greens in the oil and they will start to wilt. Turn the heat off and cover the greens until you are ready to serve them. You want your greens to remain bright green! If they start to turn dark, you know that they are losing nutrients - don't overcook them. Enjoy!










 

Sweet Potato and Pecan Bread

I saw a few extra Beauregard sweet potatoes hanging out it my make-shift potato cabinet and I had this great idea to make a sweet potato quick bread. Alas, I opened the cupboard, saw a can of pureed sweet potato that I picked up in November at my fantastic local healthy food grocery - Earth Fare - and decided that my quick bread would be truly quick... no North Carolina sweet potatoes. Maybe next time...

This recipe is super quick, super easy, and you can easily find canned pureed sweet potatoes at your local grocery store. Eat it hot out of the oven plain or with some fresh, home-made butter! 

First five ingredients

Ingredients:

1 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup orange juice
1/3 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1 can pureed sweet potatoes
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spices
1 cup pecans

Right out of the oven...

Directions: 

Combine first five ingredients in a stand mixer. Combine dry ingredients separately and add gradually to the sweet potato mixture. Stir in chopped pecans. Pour into a large loaf pan and cook at 350 degrees for an hour. This bread is very dense - I definitely needed the full hour and I probably could have gone over a few minutes and it would have been fine.

** Do you want to make this gluten free? I made this recipe using Better Batter's gluten free all-purpose flour mix! It worked perfectly - I didn't change a thing in this recipe and I can't wait to experiment with Better Batter in other baking projects.

Better Batter - Gluten Free!

Slow Cooker 4 Ingredient Bratwursts

Four ingredients, less than four hours... delicious! We buy delicious pork bratwursts from our virtual farmers market. These bratwursts are from C-Saw Hill Farm in Rutherford, NC - a farm started by a couple who wanted to provide food for their family and their community that was not factory farmed or over-processed. This fabulous couple's other job is teaching high school students how to farm sustainably! Wow.

Depending on how much time I have to prepare dinner and how clean my kitchen is, I sometimes brown the bratwursts before tossing them in the crockpot. Yesterday, however, my kitchen was sparkling. A rare occurrence. I didn't want to mess it up. I know that some of you know exactly what I am talking about... Yesterday there was no browning of the bratwursts. I chopped them into bite size pieces and added them directly to the Crockpot.

After adding the bratwurst, I roughly peeled two large apples (North Carolina Pink Lady Apples!) and chopped them about the same size as the bratwurst. I also chopped a small onion and added that to the mix.

The fourth and final ingredient: sauerkraut. I love sauerkraut on reuben sandwiches but I had never made it or cooked with it. Sauerkraut is basically pickled cabbage. The downside to sauerkraut is its high salt content. I used 1 can of sauerkraut in this recipe.

After combining the following four ingredients: 

1 lb. bratwursts, chopped into bite-size pieces
2 large apples, peeled and chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1 can sauerkraut (about 14 ounces)

Cook on high 3 hours. We served the bratwursts and sauerkraut in bowls with delicious cornbread on the side and a plate of fresh crunchy veggies. Another meal with no leftovers... Enjoy!

Making Butter...

If you are looking for an easy (and fun!) project to do with your children, try making butter! I will warn you, however, that once you make your own butter, nothing store bought will ever taste as good. I recommend organic cream - it really tastes better. 

Making butter is quite easy - you need a small jar with a tight fitting lid - baby food jars or small jelly jars work great, whipping cream, and a little salt.

Step 1. The process will go much quicker if you start with the whipping cream at room temperature or close to room temperature.

Step 2. Fill the small jar almost to the top with the cream and add a tiny bit of salt.

Step 3. SHAKE!! We brought the jar outside and passed it around letting the kids shake it until they were tired.

Step 4. The cream slowly changes to butter - the butter starts to harden and the liquid that separates off is buttermilk.

Butter and buttermilk

Step 5. The kids were so excited to watch the cream slowly change to butter! After they tired of shaking, I put the cream from the jar into my stand mixer and mixed it for a just a bit.

Step 6. Take the butter and transfer it to a small container so it can be refrigerated. I poured the buttermilk back into the mason jar to be used later in a recipe.

SHAKE!

Why not make a heart?

Although we did put the butter in the fridge, we first put it on fresh bread, dipped pretzels in it, and taste-tested it on a spoon! Just for fun, I put some in a silicon heart mold. You can shape it any way you like. We kept our butter very plain, but you can add any sugar or herbs to make a seasoned butter. Maybe next time... Enjoy!

Goat Cheese and Kale Stuffed Flank Steak

A new month, a new recipe involving kale... SO easy. And, of course, delicious. I am pretty sure I found a way to use kale in four very different ways last week and I did not hear one peep of complaint from my tireless taste testers. For this recipe, I had some flank steak rubbed with cajun seasoning sitting in the refrigerator looking for love. I have a fear of using the broiler and I don't know how to use the gas grill at our house so that left me with one option: bake it. (We can address my broiling and grilling issues in another post...)

I was worried about the steak getting too tough if I just put it in the oven at 350 degrees so I "butterflied" the meat - sliced it down the middle to create butterfly wings - and then laid some fresh kale and about a tablespoon of delicious herbed goat cheese from The Looking Glass Creamery located not too far away in Asheville, North Carolina. I had picked up the kale at the farmers market the week before and it was still looking bright green and delicious. I used toothpicks to keep the steak closed around the kale and cheese.

After I stuffed and toothpicked the flank steak, I placed them in a pie dish (my favorite piece of dinner cookware) and cooked it at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

I served the stuffed flank steak with quinoa and baby carrots. Enjoy!