Roasted Sweet Potato Nachos

Layers of roasted sweet potatoes seasoned with salsa verde, black beans, salsa and even taco meat if you've got it--all tucked under a blanket of cheese and baked until bubbly. Serve with tortilla chips for a tasty vegetable appetizer, another Awesome Veggie App {link to my Pinterest board}.

It's time for the Game!

In our family, that could mean Ticket To Ride, Sushi Go!, Qwirkle, Timeline or our newest find, Black Fleet (all game links are Amazon affiliate links). Several years ago, after repeated failures attempts we became a family who plays games together.

We don't play Candyland or Monopoly. To be honest, I never found those games particularly enjoyable and thought I just wasn't the type of person who liked to play games. I was wrong. It wasn't me--it was the games we had. If you'd like to have a blast playing games together, read on. If not, jump down to the nachos.

How did we become a game-playing family? My spouse. His engineer brain took on the task after my efforts failed, and he has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Over the holidays we had 12 people around the table, 3 generations, ages 14-86, laughing to the point of bladder control issues while playing Telestrations.

Telestrations is a combo of Telephone and Pictionary. Each person gets a drawing pad and a list of words. You read a word, draw a picture to describe the word, then pass your pad to the next person who writes a word based on your drawing. That person passes it to the next, who draws a picture based on the word they see, and so on. We bought 2 games so we'd have enough drawing pads for everyone--it's great for large group.

The Board Game Family is the blog where my spouse discovered our first successful games. Check them out here. Once you know the style of game that you like to play, you can find new ones yourself. We've had great success with Spiel des Jahres winners, and now enjoy cooperative as well as competitive games each week. It's great fun--yes I'm saying this about sitting around the dining room table playing games with my teens--and good for our mental and emotional health as well.

We don't feed our games, so the table gets cleared off, hands washed, and food put away before the games come out. If you're interested in another sort of game--say, you wanna watch football while eating these nachos--be my guest. They're certainly yummy and would work for that sort of game too.

For other recipes using sweet potatoes, please see my Sweet Potato Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index for this blog.

Swiss Chard Sauté

Swiss chard stems and leaves quickly sautéed with a bit of onion and finished with a splash of vinegar. This side dish goes with a variety of meals and uses a large bunch of chard.

Buy ALL the vegetables!

Eat ALL the rainbows!

If you haven't seen Hyperbole and a Half's hilarious post, This is Why I'll Never be an Adult, (which provided me the inspiration for the intro to today's post) please do yourself a favor and pop over to read it. You can find it here, and I'll wait patiently while you read.  I've got a cup of tea handy.

Have you ever gone shopping--at the farmer's market, the grocery store, or Costco--and been struck with the desire to EAT ALL THE RAINBOWS? You buy more vegetables than your fridge can hold, convinced that this time, THIS TIME will be different and you'll magically find room for it all and eat everything before it spoils. That's the problem--buy too many bags of potato chips and they'll keep wherever you find space for them. Not so much for bags of Swiss chard. 

I rarely shop at the farmer's market since my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers do such a terrific job of keeping me in fresh veggies from June into December (and then I do a pretty good job of keeping myself in veggies for the intervening months, eating up the veggies I've put up in the freezer, the pantry, and the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve). Mostly when I hit the farmer's market I'm picking up honey, maple syrup, and the occasional mushroom. If I didn't have a CSA, though, I'd routinely come home with more produce than I could store.

This side dish is great for when your pile of new veggies exceeds your available fridge space. [While I'm doing my weekly post-CSA pickup vegetable triage, I leave Swiss chard on the counter. A lovely large bunch takes up so much room that I may as well sauté it up and serve it with dinner.] It's fast, requires very few pantry staples, and goes with a variety of entrees from fried eggs to Beetloaf. While it is a simple recipe, it's great to have a fast, easy, and basic cooked greens side dish method in your back pocket [next to your phone].

For other Swiss Chard recipes, please see my Swiss Chard Recipe Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index.

Winter Squash & Banana Muffins {Monday Muffins}

Working title Asante Sana Squash Banana Muffins*, these soaked oat, wheat and flax muffins have roasted winter squash with banana and maple syrup for sweetening. Like other banana-containing baked goods these are terrific the next day and make a great breakfast or afternoon snack.

I'm not a control freak in the kitchen. I usually welcome all the help I can get [and I'm still enjoying the fruits err vegetables of my niece's and nephew's labors over the holidays when I had them chop up what turned out to be 5 recipes worth of mirepoix aka onion, celery, and carrot. Oopsie. Well, Faster Kirsten miscalculated but appreciates the effort nonetheless. Tak, Albert & Astrid.] Sometimes, though, the help is not entirely helpful. 

Unless your kitchen is populated by creatures who haven't figured out how to open the fridge door or who haven't mastered lifting the lids off containers, you've probably experienced a 'helpful' and hungry kitchen assistant 'cleaning up' the leftovers that were actually planned overs. Perhaps you intended the various parts of the meal NOT to end up all in the same container [because, you know, the light sucked at dinner and you wanted to photograph your leftover lunch for the blog]. 

The addition of flax into my standard soaked oatmeal muffin recipe came because of a helpful kitchen mate. My spouse dumped a bunch of ground flax seed into the container of rolled oats, thinking it would boost the nutrition of his morning bowl of oatmeal. He was not quite satisfied with the results, so I offered to take the rest of the container off his hands despite knowing I couldn't use any of the results for the blog [he didn't measure the amount of oats remaining in the container nor the amount of flax he dumped in with them]. After making muffins, waffles and more muffins I decided the combination is pretty useful, so once I'd emptied the container I played around with the amount of flax seed and came up with this version.

I've made these muffins three times now, and even shared them with the terrific physical therapists working with my son. It's been a while since I've posted a Monday Muffin recipe [like, last year, man], so I figured I'd kick off 2015 with these. Since I'm using maple syrup and a banana for sweetening, if you've made any resolutions regarding granulated sugar these would still fit in with your goals. If, like me & Meghan you've still got a pile of winter squash in your basement . . . well, here's an idea of what to do with it that the family--and the physical therapists--approve.

For other ideas using Winter Squash, please see my Winter Squash Recipes Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient.

2014 Year in Review--the Photo Montage Palooza Edition

A mindless read for when you've got a moment to sit and visit with me

Why does everyone always end up in the kitchen?

I can't say that the year has flown by, but after hosting 4 amazing meals in 3 days for [and with help of] my extended family of 12 folks I can say that the last week has flown by. This wrap up post will be my last of 2014, and I'll be back on Monday, January 5, 2015, with Asante Sana Squash Banana Muffins. [You have to read it in the voice of Rafiki from Lion King. If you haven't seen Lion King you've got a week to bring yourself up to speed. And get an acorn squash. And a banana.]

This is my second Year in Review post, because I've completed my second full year of blogging.  I still enjoy it and have learned so many things from so many wonderful bloggers. This year I realized that I need to give myself permission to take breaks. When I do, I come back recharged and with the energy to implement changes I've envisioned. This Year In Review will be a bit different than last year's primarily because I still need to update some of my spreadsheets, but instead of trying to get the gumption to do those I figured I'd just go with what I've got ready. Let's get to the details.

First, a comparison of my statistics for the past year--first from Google Analytics (the real, accurate stuff) then from Blogger (which includes spam bots and is just not accurate, but that's what I see when I sign in so I'll throw it up here as well).

People came to my blog in 2014 looking for recipe ideas for produce--fresh tomatoes, green tomatoes, garlic scapes, kale, spinach and leeks. You also came looking for recipes for tomato soup, buttermilk pizza crust, make ahead mashed potatoes, healthy muffins, celery soup, fig pizza and leftovers. 

My top 10 search terms, according to Google Analytics, follow this trend:

But those are just the most common search terms--there are some gems if you read through all 4000 search terms that brought folks to the blog this year.  The most memorable search term for 2014 was my guinea pig ate a pepperoni. Here are the Honorable Mentions, in alphabetical order:

"Monday morning is fine with me" [yes, the quotes are included]

are turkey, ham and chicken excellent Thanksgiving items for a compost bin? [Umm, no. Not the way I make my compost, at least.]

are garlic scapes available year round? [sadly, no, but here are recipe ideas for you]

best damn vegetable tray [here are some suggestions]

chicken feets and beetroot soup [I don't have any chicken feet recipes. Yet.]

dwarf peach tree harvest [although we have a dwarf peach tree, only the certified wildlife harvest it]

fall lasagna; roasted mushrooms, butternut squash, spinach and caramelized onions layered with fontina and herbed ricotta [that sounds amazing. what time is dinner?]

food photography behind the scenes [yeah, I like to peek behind the scenes too]

forgot salt in muffin [I hear ya. Usually I forget the sugar.]

green vista farms zucchini hawaiian pizza brats casserole [what an interesting combination, do let me know how it turns out]

help I don't know how to cook with my greens from farm! [you've come to the right place.]

homemade sugar smacks [this recipe will definitely disappoint you then]

how to make a chocolate milkshake without ice cream [well, you could try using beets]

how to make a sweet potato casserole with white irish potatoes [I haven't tried this one before]

how to put pesto on a pizza [I use a spoon generally, and fling it carefully]

is adding cheddar shredded to my grilled cheese a good idea [Yes, yes it is]

Monday with Hatch chiles [I've read Tuesdays with Morrie]

my lou malnati's pizza arrived defrosted [you can order pizza? Cool, thanks for letting me know]

overabundance of turnips [story of my life. Here's some ideas]

play bacon and cabbage song [could you hum a few bars?]

pumpkin liver sausage dip [what an interesting combination, let me know how it turns out]

show the picture of kohlrabi [you can find one here]

turnip greens recipes that kids will eat which is not pizza or macaroni [I'm working on that one, myself. So far this is the best I've got.]

visit parade.com for sheila's snappy ginger slaw recipe [thanks for the tip]

wow me a meatloaf [Ok, here ya go.]

www.drunkenpizza.com [there's a website? Here's a pizza]

That little spike in the first graphic?  That's from the debut of my Clickable Collages of Recipe Suggestions. I posted it on G+ and folks popped over to check it out. I've got suggestions for what to do with produce, like beets, garlic scapes, or green tomatoes, as well as recipe ideas--like hummus or grilled cheese.

What am I most proud of? My newly revamped Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient.  I'd had the idea of what I wanted for quite some time, but didn't have the ability to create it until September.  My son has asked me to tweak it--to add categories for, say, chicken or liver instead of just fruits and vegetables. I think his suggestion is a great one and will be working on it.  Here's what the landing page looks like now:

Clicking on, for example, Garlic & Garlic Scapes brings you to the collection of recipes using those items, as seen here:

I really like folks to be able to find my recipes, so I'm delighted with the changes I made. I'm also pleased that this recipe index is used by you folks--more than a thousand views this past year:

At the beginning of 2014 our household animal collection consisted of 3 dogs and a composting guinea pig. At the end of the year we have 3 dogs (we've substituted Robert Barker for Wee Oliver Picklepants) but no composting guinea pig. I've earned over the $100 Google Adsense payout threshold twice, so the hosting fees are covered for a while. I pushed out of my comfort zone participating in #AppetizerWeek, #IceCreamWeek, and most recently #ChristmasWeek. This fall I got interested in spiffing up my Pinterest presence, and created the Farm Fresh Feasts board where I've shared every post, in order. It's been fun to look back at the changes over the months/years (gulp).

At my 4th amazing meal in 3 days (which was Thanksgiving dinner, you can see the Make Ahead Irish Mashed Potato Casserole in the slow cooker) I got a round of applause. If you've read this far--give yourself a round of applause too! See ya in 2015!

Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies #ChristmasWeek

[the title pretty much says it all]

Welcome to Day Four of Christmas Week. This event is hosted by Kim of Cravings of a Lunatic and Susan of The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen. We hope to inspire you to break out those holiday sprinkles and get your bake on!

There are times when I feel like an utter failure as a food blogger. It's not the recipes/writing/photography/technical computer stuff, you know, the business of blogging, that gets to me--it's the capital F Foodie part.

I may have 6 different vinegars in my pantry and 20 recipes for beets in my Beet Recipes Collection, but I am not a real Foodie. I have eaten at only one of the 20+ fancy schmancy restaurants in my town [and that was because my book group met there!]. In fact, I'm perfectly happy with a Five Guys burger and fries or a plate of Waffle House Chocolate Chip Waffles. The recipes I share on this blog are, for the most part, pretty basic stuff like these Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies.

I'm sharing them today for #ChristmasWeek simply because I like to celebrate all that is simple and good--from a breakfast of beet greens or a side dish of Chinese cabbage from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share to a tasty and flavorful cookie like these.

I like to bake chocolate chip cookies because the whole process fits in with my schedule. Unlike brownies which need to be mixed and baked all at once [and when you're making 8 dozen Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive that's a big chunk of time], chocolate chip cookies taste better when they are done in installments. When I expect to have 30 minutes free I'll set the butter out to soften ahead of time, then mix up the dough when I'm ready. I will chill this dough overnight or up to a couple of days. When I'm ready to bake I scoop up what I want to use, and I can re-chill or even freeze the rest until I need it. Making cookies this way--in small chunks of kitchen time--fits with my schedule best and leaves me more time to try and get a decent shot of the dogs in their thrift shop holiday finery. Here's an outtake:

Simon is patiently waiting to be allowed to leave while Robert Barker keeps trying to eat his hat  (it tastes yummy) and Vincent in his Santa Paws coat just wishes everyone would cooperate so he can have his turn to shine. Oh, and I went and got my hair done did. It's been a year--it was time.

Swing by all the #ChristmasWeek participants to see what they've been whipping up for the holidays:

Coconut Filled Sandwich Cookies by Cravings of a Lunatic

Ridiculously Delicious Vanilla Cookies by Cookistry

Peppermint Sugar Cookie Bars by Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts

Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies by Farm Fresh Feasts

Cranberry Ginger Margaritas by Hezzi-D's Books and Cooks

Rocky Road Chocolate Bark by Cooking In Stilettos

Apple Streusel Bars by That Skinny Chick Can Bake

Rum Blondies with Cinnamon Chips by From Gate to Plate

Scandinavian Fruit Soup

This chilled soup is an excellent counterpart to a cookie tray. It provides contrasting flavors and textures without refined sugars, while still being a sweet finish to the meal. It also makes an excellent bedtime snack after candlelight services and keeps for several days in the fridge. For my third recipe of #ChristmasWeek we're heading back to Scandinavia for Fruit Soup.

Growing up, Christmas Eve was the big meal of the holiday. My folks would round up strays (folks who didn't otherwise have plans for the evening) and serve a smorgasbord of fish, Swedish meatballs (link to my folks making a batch for the blog), boiled potatoes, more fish (did I mention the pickled herring?) and lefse--that recipe is coming on Friday to round out #ChristmasWeek. 

On Christmas Eve after piling on all of the fish smorgasbord delights, we'd push back from the table and go digest somewhere. Typically us kids would play Bobby Hull hockey in the basement while the adults visited upstairs. After a period of time, we'd reconvene at the table for dessert: cookies and fruit soup. And more lefse, because you can never have too much of a good thing like lefse.

Do you get a tangerine in the toe of your stocking? I grew up with tangerines in my stocking, reading about Almanzo Wilder getting an orange in his stocking in the Little House on the Prairie series, and now we've got the Band Fruit Fundraiser citrus piled up in the basement (link to my fruit round up featuring 156 recipes using fall and winter fruits). As much as I love dark chocolate peppermint bark-coated roast beast, fruit is also an integral part of my Christmas sweets spread.

If you like to eat locally, Scandinavian Fruit Soup is your excuse to pull out the packages of beets berries you put up while they were in season. [In my case, I came across way too many packages of roasted beets in my quest to find blueberries, so beet & orange smoothies are my current breakfast drink of choice necessity]. If you don't have local fruit put up, canned or frozen fruit works great.  I'm especially partial to canned cherries--terrific flavor--and I love how the grapes in fruit cocktail look in the dark juice.

My recipes for #ChristmasWeek have been a mixture of getting my ethnic on and classic sweets that I just love to eat any time of year, but make especially for the holidays. Monday I shared Finnish Pulla {Cardamom Coffee Braid}, yesterday I shared lessons learned from making Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive, tomorrow I'll share Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Friday I'm bringing #ChristmasWeek home with Norwegian Lefse. For more of my traditional savory & farm share centric recipes, please see my Visual Recipe Index.

Swing by all the participants to see what they've been whipping up for the holidays:

Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies by Cravings of a Lunatic

Peppermint Spritz Cookies by The Girl In The Little Red Kitchen

Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls by Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts

Scandinavian Fruit Soup by Farm Fresh Feasts

Egg Nog Pound Cake by My Catholic Kitchen

Coquito Cheesecake Flan by Mind Over Batter

Mulled Wine Fruit Gums by Food Lust People Love

Soft Vanilla Caramels by That Skinny Chick Can Bake

Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive #ChristmasWeek

Need/want to make 8 dozen brownie bites for a cookie drive or a whole bunch of cookie plates? Look no further! My second recipe of #ChristmasWeek is well suited to mass production and full of chocolatey goodness as well. I share my 3 lessons learned so you don't have the failures I did.

Welcome to Day Two of Christmas Week. This event is hosted by Kim of Cravings of a Lunatic and Susan of The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen. We hope to inspire you to break out those holiday sprinkles and get your bake on!

Hanging in my house is a poster of Life's Little Instructions. On it are such gems as 'overtip breakfast waitresses' and 'when you borrow a car, return it with the gas tank full', but one of my favorite ones is 'never refuse a plate of homemade brownies'. I don't care if the ingredients for the brownies came out of a single box or from multiple containers in your pantry--to me, if the brownies come out of YOUR oven they are homemade.

What if you want to give homemade brownies to 1,500 single Airmen who are spending Christmas away from their families? Or, more realistically, if you wanted to contribute several dozen brownies to the Airmen's Cookie Drive? You need a few Mass Production Techniques to enable you to churn out tray after tray, and that's why I wrote up this post for #ChristmasWeek.

Making individual sized treats for a cookie drive is a Big Project. Making brownies for a cookie drive [is that even legal? I mean, they're not technically cookies, whatever the technical definition of a cookie is] is another level of hassle. You either need to cut your pan nice and even [no 'you cut and your sister chooses first' here] or you need to make individual brownies and get them safely out of the pan.

Lesson #1:  Use paper liners.
Trust me and the pile of failures I shared with my kids and on my FB page. [Perhaps the kids would prefer we skip this lesson and just have 8 dozen less-than-perfect brownie bites piled up around the kitchen.] To spray or not to spray the paper liners I leave up to you. I didn't spray, nor do I spray my brownie pan normally. There are 3 sticks of butter in there, for crying out loud!

Lesson #2:  If you're using nuts, GO BIG.
I like nuts in my brownies, but I'd never put nut-filled brownies in a cookie tray for my friends who have food allergies. While the Cookie Drive Organizers said that nuts were OK, I didn't want the volunteers to guess if my brownies contained nuts.  Instead, I went big and glued a big ol' pecan half on top of each brownie using a candy melt. You can see through the lid that these treats belong with the other nut-filled goodies.

Lesson #3:  Just do it. It will make you feel good.

Doing for others makes you feel good. If you love to bake, then baking for others is an exceptional way to feel good. You don't need an Airmen's Cookie Drive either--police stations, fire stations, animal shelters and hospitals would be glad to follow the instructions to 'never refuse a plate of homemade brownies'.

Are you trampled by turnips? Collared by kohlrabi? Buried in beets? For recipes using my usual suspects, please refer to my Visual Recipe Index until #ChristmasWeek ends and I return to my local food, mostly savory ways.  If you're tempted by sweets and looking for holiday ideas--yesterday I shared Finnish Pulla {Cardamom Coffee Braid}, tomorrow I'll share Scandinavian Fruit Soup, Thursday brings us Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and I'll close out the week with Norwegian Lefse on Friday.

Swing by all the #ChristmasWeek participants to see what they've been whipping up for the holidays:

Chocolate Shortbread Wedges with Pistachios by Cravings of a Lunatic

Turtle Hot Chocolate by  The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen

Rum Raspberry Tart by Cookistry

Chocolate Saltine Toffee (aka Christmas Crack) by Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts

Pecan Brownie Bites by Farm Fresh Feasts (that's me!)

Peppermint Brownie Cookies by Mind Over Batter

Bourbon Brownies by Cooking In Stilettos

Finnish Pulla {Cardamom Coffee Braid}

This is a recipe for Finnish Pulla, a cardamom-spiced lightly sweet braided bread. It is delicious plain or with butter, served alongside tea or coffee, or as an after school snack. The recipe makes three loaves which is terrific for gift giving during the holidays. 

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Baking: art or science? Discuss.

When I first saw this bread being made it was all art: building the fire in the wood stove, mixing the ingredients until the dough looked right then braiding, decorating, and finally baking the bread. To my young, fresh-out-of-college eyes Eila Akkanen's ability to create this bread was purely magic. [Looking back on that summer, Eila was doing her weekly baking in the the farmhouse kitchen where she'd raised her family and had probably performed that 'magic' thousands of times.]

I think baking used to be considered an art, or perhaps more accurate, a series of crafts. Building a fire to the proper baking temperature is as much a learned skill as kneading dough or even beading bracelets. Nowadays I don't need to know much about building a baking fire--I use the keypad on the oven to type in the precise temperature I'd like, and double check it with my oven thermometer. I could re-learn the chemical equations which describe the reactions of a pile of ingredients turning into a loaf of bread, but I don't need to know how it works--just that it does.

I braid one side towards the middle, then the other, then finish by pinching the end pieces together.

My approach to this recipe is a mixture of science and art. Because my kitchen temperature averages 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, I use my bread machine to mix the dough [don't worry if you don't have a freezing kitchen and a bread machine, I'll provide directions for mixing the dough]. When the machine is finished, though, my experienced eye takes over and shapes the dough until it looks right.

The inspiring recipe came from Beatrice Ojakangas' book Fantastically Finnish. Instead of starting with whole cardamom pods I use the ground spice, and because I first had this while working on a dairy farm I like to use a richer milk. I have made this bread using all cream--very rich dough, very tender crumb, great way to use up 2 cups of heavy cream--as well as half & half and even 2% milk. Normally I'll say 'use what you have on hand' but if you've only got fat free milk please go grab a pint of half & half before making this. It is the holidays after all. 

Speaking of holidays, I'll be sharing sweet recipes each day during #ChristmasWeek. Tuesday I'll be sharing 3 lessons learned making Pecan Brownie Bites for a Cookie Drive, Wednesday it's back to Scandinavia for Fruit Soup, Thursday we're keeping things simple with Toffee Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Friday I finish getting my ethnic on with My Mother's Norwegian Lefse. 

If you're not into sweets, check out my Visual Recipe Index for more savory ideas for what to do with the produce from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, farmer's market, and garden.

Salami Alfredo Pizza (Pizza Night!)

Gooey cheese and spicy salami on top of creamy Alfredo sauce for a hot mess of a pizza.
A subtitle could be: where to find the tools you need for successful pizza at home.

Almost as many times as I've shared a Friday Night Pizza Night recipe here I've also said to preheat a pizza stone if you've got one [one glaring exception would be deep dish pizzas which I cook in cast iron skillets]. Now I'm going to say that if you like to make pizza at home and don't already have a stone, GO GET ONE. I took my stone out to make room for the turkey last month and didn't even notice it was gone when I made a deep dish Thanksgiving leftover pizza [with green bean casserole--who knew?]. Last weekend I preheated my oven while I was dithering over what kind of pizza to make for my birthday**. I assembled my pies, opened the oven door to slide the first one off the peel onto the . . . . oops.

Well that was unexpected. I ended up using a cookie sheet and my crust was no where near where it usually is crispness-wise.  The stone really makes a difference. I even wrote an ode to mine.  Here's a link to King Arthur Flour where I bought my stone, and an Amazon affiliate link for good measure. The shape shouldn't matter, but I like how my rectangle fits in my oven and how I can easily fit multiple dishes on it when I'm baking. 

My stone is broken, but unlike a casserole dish I can just push the edges to close approximation and rock on. Compared to the cost of buying a couple of pizzas every weekend, it paid for itself 15 years ago. Ditto on the pizza peel [Amazon affiliate link to my sanity-saving pizza peel] which makes getting the pizza in and out of the oven terribly easy. Triple ditto the parchment paper, though I keep on buying that stuff so it's not like it pays for itself [silicone mats do not work in this instance]. My kids just don't hear such a wide array of colorful language when I use parchment paper.

There is a pizza recipe here, I promise. This was a hot mess of a pizza, but boy did it taste good. The pictures are lousy, but I decided to share it anyway because of the flavor. We had salami left from an antipasti dinner, prepared alfredo sauce because I cannot resist a magical markdown sticker, and mozzarella because people don't make a lot of caprese salads in the winter so there's marked down mozzarella at the fancy cheese counter. You'd think that I'd know better about using thawed mozzarella slices, but you'd be wrong. This pizza made a gooey, drippy mess all over the back of the oven when I lifted it up to broil the top (photo at the end).  It was worth it.

For general hints, tips, and photo collages please check out my Pizza Primer post, a brain dump of all things related to making pizza in my home kitchen.  For a photo album of pizza dough troubleshooting tips, please see my FB page.

Ham Ball and Black Eyed Pea Chirashi Rice

Continuing to upcycle a holiday ham, this time into New Year's good luck, while getting folks to eat a wide variety of vegetables as well.

I am not a nutritionist nor much of an advice giver--but in my 8 years of experience with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share and 16 years of experience with, shall we say reluctant vegetable eaters [because if the child won't eat any type of vegetable, well, that's not a picky eater--you have to pick something in order to be picky, you know?] . . . .

This has been such a run on sentence I've lost the point. Let me sum up.

If you have a wide variety of vegetables in your house, you are more likely to include a wide variety of vegetables in your meals. If you include a wide variety of vegetables in your meals, the folks eating your meals will ingest a wide variety of vegetables. Because we joined a CSA, my kids eat a wide variety of vegetables.

It's a bold statement--but if I'd served this recipe to my kids before we joined a CSA, or in the early couple of years, they probably would have picked out the ham balls and the rice and left the rest. Sure, while they've spent the last 8 years eating from the farm share they've also been growing up--that happens--but the unrelenting exposure to a wide variety of vegetables is the foundation of the change. Extrapolating from the end of season survey, we got more than 40 different vegetables over the course of the 20 weeks.  That's a wide variety, and more than I would have bought had it been up to me (ahem, mustard greens, turnips, and beets I'm talking to you!).

This recipe is a great example of how having extra vegetables on hand means I'll add more veggies to our meals. It's also another way to get your New Year's good luck on without extra effort the day after the hoopla. For another New Year's Black Eyed Pea recipe, please see my Black Eyed Pea and Kale Salad in Salumi Cups.