Instant Pot Fruited Wild Rice Salad with Sweet Potato

This vegan and grain free Instant Pot salad combines chewy wild rice and tender sweet potato with grapes and clementines in a lemony herb dressing. Perfect for summer alongside grilled meats or for fall alongside baked meatloaf.  

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I have meaningful work and it's an amazing thing to be able to write that statement.
What does this have to do with the Instant Pot Fruited Wild Rice and Sweet Potato Salad recipe I'm sharing today? 
The short version is that I discovered the dressing I'm using in this salad (I've got a DIY version, too, see the Note below) via my work with Minnesota Central Kitchen turning rescued/donated ingredients into meals for hungry people in the Twin Cities area.
If that's enough for you please feel free to scroll on down to the recipe.

Rambutan Eyeballs--How to Make Real Food Halloween Treats

Want ideas for healthy real food Halloween treats? I've got some! Let's start with Spooky Rambutan Eyeballs, with fresh grapes and juicy rambutan in a freaky display.

Disclosure--I received a box of #FreakyFruits from Melissa's Produce without obligation. The rambutan used in today's recipe is from that box. I bought the grapes at my local grocery store.

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My kids were always ready to head out trick or treating approximately 17.5 minutes after returning home from school. Unfortunately for them Beggar Night hours didn't start until suppertime. That was my problem--how do I feed my kids something nutritious when their minds are focused on CANDY CANDY CANDY?

During the elementary school years we were fortunate to live in people-dense communities both on and off base. Since my kids could walk/roll around the neighborhood to meet their trick-or-treating needs I decided to host a pre-game Halloween tailgate party and invite our neighbors. Everyone could show off costumes while it was still light, we'd eat a bit of veggies, fruits, and protein to fuel the evening's adventures, and the parents could stand around drinking red wine in portable cups. 

[I enjoyed those years.]

Find this recipe at Cookistry.

Nowadays I still like the tradition of eating something festive yet . . . healthy/natural/less-processed/real/clean . . . you insert the adjective of your choice. To that end, I've got a guest post over on Cookistry where I'm sharing my Buddha's Hand Citron Feta Dip. It's savory and tangy, great for dipping crackers and vegetables and can be presented as scary or as spooky as you like. Please check out the recipe here. You'll find a bunch more ideas for Halloween snacks as well--sweet and savory, spooky and scary, kid and grownup alike!

I really don't care to scroll through plenty of photos and text that ends with a link to someone else's guest post, though, so I've got some value added today instead of just directing you to Donna's blog. 

Today's recipe is such a simple one I didn't think it merited an entire post, so I'm glad to offer you some options for other healthy Halloween ideas. Sometimes keeping it simple is just the thing. I figured these Rambutan Eyeballs would be an excellent addition to a Halloween spread. I've seen rambutan at the grocery store, and you can check out Melissa's Produce as well. Rambutan taste mildly sweet. They have a pit inside of them, so we found it easier to nibble around and discard the pit, though you could easily slice into the fruit and slice it from the pit.

Fruity Green Gazpacho

Sweet peppers, mild vegetables, grapes and mint make a refreshing chilled soup with a bit of an edge.

Do you ask for recipes when you taste something yummy--and homemade? I sure do. Even a vague "well, I used a bit of this, a smidgen of that, and a handful of the other thing" is enough of a jumping off point for me. When I've got the right blend of vegetables from our community supported agriculture (CSA) farm share, it's time to grab the appropriate fruits and give it a whirl. Literally.

Last September at a Cool Soups for a Hot Cause fundraiser I had a refreshing green gazpacho. It was sweet, but had a bit of edginess to let me know it wasn't entirely a fruit soup. [I've got my family's Scandinavian Fruit Soup on the blog if you want an entirely fruit soup.] After my second helping--which came after tasting ALL THE SOUPS on offer--I asked how it was made. The generous cook behind the tureen told me it had white grape juice and mint, and that she'd used the recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook(Amazon Affiliate link). I made a mental note to find it, but after googling a bunch I never found that recipe.

Instead, I found this recipe for a green gazpacho without white grape juice. That looks good, but not the sweet-with-a-bite soup I'd enjoyed. I kept on searching. This recipe has the grape juice, but also jalapeño and the soup I liked was not spicy. Alanna shares her recipe--a more precise version with honeydew and grapes--here.

In the end I cobbled together a few ingredients in the blender and hoped for the best. The result was cool and creamy, sweet and just a little bit edgy, and we enjoyed drinking it. I cannot find my paper with precise measurements yet I'm going to war with the troops I have so I'm deliberately vague in the recipe below. This is clearly one of those 'taste as you go' situations.

Roasted Shrimp and Potato Salad with Grapes and Celery

A savory and sweet, crunchy and filling late summer salad with roasted potatoes and shrimp, chopped celery, and whole grapes in a dilled yogurt-mayonnaise-lemon dressing.

I've been doing a lot of walking to train for a half marathon, and part of my walking has been to pick up milk at the local grocery store.  Normally I have Simon (the photobombing dog below) with me, waiting patiently at the dog tie up & water station, so I don't linger in the aisles.  The other morning, however, my daughter and I walked together, and after walking in the woods (just found out there's elevation changes on the course, so I need to get some hills in) she and Simon headed home and I headed to the store for milk (and to pad my mileage).  I had time to linger over the deli section, and two salads in particular caught my eye--a dilled shrimp, celery, and grape salad and a dilled lemon potato salad.

On the way home (lugging a gallon of milk is not the hassle it used to be--a side benefit of having kids who go through a gallon every 36 hours) I wondered what would happen if I combined the two salads and, for grins and giggles, roasted the potatoes and shrimp instead of boiling or steaming them.

Since the celery I'm regrowing in my garden is doing amazingly well (of course it is, since I'm only meh on celery by itself, though I love it in soup packs and to help stretch a pound of ground meat) I figured I'd try and combine the recipes.  Our farmers have a nifty new tool, a potato digger, and we've been getting lovely harvests of red potatoes lately, so I had most everything I needed.  I played around with my kitchen scale again, like I did in my Chicken Salad by the Ounce recipe, but this time in metric form.  The volumes in this recipe are my estimation of the weights I used.

Grapes, Goat cheese and Red Onion with Fennel Focaccia

Sweet purple grapes, fresh red onion, and tangy goat cheese on a chewy light fennel focaccia.

After sharing a pair of peach pizzas last Friday, and a raspberry pizza the Friday before, I thought I should move back to vegetable pizzas for my Friday Night Pizza Night posts.  After all, I've got a sweet potato dough and a roasted pumpkin dough that I want to share with you.

However, I don't want this focaccia to drop off my radar.

I had a very productive period making and poorly photographing--but not writing up headnotes for--a pile of tasty recipes, and I thought I'd get them all written up over the summer.

Didn't happen.

I don't want everything to slip through the cracks, or rather fall off the stacks of recipe notes on my work table or dissolve into rows of scrolled-past photos in my ever-expanding photo library.  I don't want to start posting every day, either.  Three days a week is working for me (is it working for you?  too much? I should do a survey sometime.  After I've gotten all those blogs written up I'll ponder it).

I'm going to share a third fruity Friday Night Pizza Night (that's a link to my board of the same name on Pinterest) and then switch over to vegetables next week.  The chicken, peach, Hatch chile, spinach, red onion BBQ pizza will have to wait until next summer, as will the cantaloupe and prosciutto.  Something to look forward to, my spouse always says.

This focaccia uses fennel seeds in the dough.  I bought a bag of them because Alyssa's Skinny Italian Wedding Soup With Kale recipe over at Everyday Maven sounded good, and I figured the seeds could be useful to have on hand.  I'm glad I did--I now use fennel seeds in sourdough bread, Italian sausage, and spaghetti sauce.  Fennel seeds (for me at least) are versatile and not a seldom-used spice around here (I'm talking about you, sumac-for-fattoush and dill-seed-for-pickles).

This is not my first focaccia rodeo, though apparently all of the focaccias I've been making, photographing (and not writing up blog posts about) have yet to grace the screen.  So I'm going to refer you to my Arugula Pesto Focaccia with Artichokes, Feta, Goat Cheese and Green Olives if you want a thorough write up about what to do with your focaccia dough to turn it into focaccia, or why you should listen to my spouse and try focaccia.