Food Lush

DIY Toddler Food: Fruit Leather

By Hillary

I hate spending money on individually-portioned snack food because I feel like I'm paying more for the wrapping than the food (and I end up feeling guilty about the pile of garbage I'm left with.) I especially hate spending money on snack food that is easy enough to make myself (don't even get me started on my husband who buys bags of popped popcorn that costs ten times more than buying kernels and popping it himself.)

All of this is to say that I cringe when I buy fruit leather for my kid so I tried to make my own.

Choose your fruit! I used four pears (skin on,) two apples (peeled,) and five carrots (not a fruit but I'm desperate to get my kid to eat vegetables and will try anything.)

Chop it all up and put in a pot over medium heat.

Add your spice / sweetener! I added the juice of a lemon and a couple tablespoons of apple juice (so the fruit wouldn't burn to the bottom of the pan before its juices were released.) You can add sugar, honey, cinammon, whatever you want.

Cook until your fruit and veg are soft and then puree until smooth.

Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and spread the puree evenly over top.

My oven's lowest temperature is 175F on the convection setting so that's what I went with. It took about eight hours for my leather to be fully cooked. You want the top to be matte and not sticky.

Slice it up and store in the fridge.

Will I make it again? Probably. It tastes great. I like that I know exactly what went into it. It took a lot of time to make but it was mostly unattended so it wasn't time-consuming. Overall I'd call my fruit leather experiment a success.

(Photo from my overused Instagram account)

Citrus Pudding: Lighten Up Your Winter Desserts

by Elissa

As the days get shorter and the weather gets colder, one of my consolations is the return of good citrus fruit. I've had this recipe for tangelo pudding bookmarked forever and have been waiting for the return of citrus to give it a whirl.  Basically, you make a very simple pudding from fresh-squeezed citrus juice, zest, and cornstarch. Add a little whipped cream and you have a perfectly elegant dessert.

I substituted grapefruit juice for the tangelo juice, added a little more sugar, and skipped the orange flower water (I didn't have any). The result was amazing: fresh, sweet, tart, and tasting much more decadent than you would expect. I used whipped cream from a can, but I'm sure that fresh whipped cream with a little Grand Marnier (as Russ Parsons suggests) would be sublime. I think this would be the an excellent end to a hearty winter meal like braised short ribs or roast chicken. I can't wiat to try it with the oroginal tangelos, and any other citrus I can get my hands on over the next few months!

Fall Produce Recommendation: Comice Pears

by Elissa

I love a good pear, but my experiences with a lot of varieties are mixed. A good Bartlett or Bosc pear can be great, but the ones I get at the grocery store are often not that good. The variety that almost never lets me down is Comice.

They don't look particularly fabulous, but they ripen beautifully on the counter and are juicy and delicious. Keep an eye out for them at the supermarket, and let them ripen until they start to give when pressed. Then enjoy, but keep a napkin nearby because pears this juicy can get messy!

The Perfect Apple Pie

by Elsha

I love homemade apple pie. Served warm with vanilla ice cream; it may be the perfect fall dessert. Apple pie was the first pie I learned how to make, and I haven't found a better recipe. Here’s how you make it:

You’ll need a two crust pie crust. I make mine using this recipe. 

6-8 Granny smith apples, peeled and sliced (about 6 cups). Make sure your slices aren’t too thick or they won’t cook all the way and you’ll end up with crunchy pie.

3/4 to 1 cup sugar 

2 Tbsp flour

1 tsp cinnamon

dash of nutmeg

2 Tbsp butter

Stir the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg into the apple slices. It will seem dry at first, but as you stir the juice from the apples will dissolve the sugar. Pour the mixture into the bottom crust in your pie pan. Add a few dabs of butter to the top of the mixture before placing the top crust. Put on your top crust and pinch the edges together. (Or watch an instructional video on how to make pretty crust edges and do that.) Cut a couple of vents in your top crust for steam to escape. Sprinkle it with sugar.

Bake at 400 degrees for 50 minutes. 

Also, here’s a tip: make an extra batch (or several) and freeze it! Then the next time you want pie you just have to thaw some filling. Throw in a refrigerated pie crust and fresh pie is ready with little work and less clean up. How awesome is that?

Apples recipes

by Elsha

It's fall. The mornings are chilly, the leaves are changing color, and our apples are ripe. We have three apple trees, two granny smith and one fuji (I think). Three trees means a LOT of apples. Obviously we'll eat some of them fresh, and we'll make some apple desserts (pies, crisp, tarts) but this year I wanted to try some new things. I went looking for some non-dessert apple recipes and here are the ones I definitely want to make.

(photo from The Pioneer Woman)

This apple, pecan, and blue cheese salad by The Pioneer Woman. I eat a salad most days for lunch, so I'm always looking for ways to change it up.

These apple and cheddar scones by Smitten Kitchen. I think these would be excellent with a good broccoli cheddar soup. 

How about some apple muffins by The Girl Who Ate Everything? Alright, this one leans a little more to the dessert-y side of things, but I've never made apple muffins and these sound delicious.

It might take a little convincing to get my family to try this recipe for shredded brussels sprouts and apples by 101 Cookbooks, but I think it needs to happen.

And I'm pretty much drooling on my keyboard over this recipe for crispy turnovers with apple, bacon, and caramelized onion by The Kitchn. Puff pastry! With apples! And bacon! And optional gouda! I definitely want them with gouda.

Do you have a favorite apple recipe I should try?

Easy, Delicious, Impressive Meal Accompaniment: Grilled Pineapple

by Caitlin

A great thing about being forced into an allergy diet is that you're also forced into creativty. When you've got very limited options you've just gotta figure out different ways of putting things together, and it's a great excuse to attempt some things I've always wanted to try. So! Maybe this grilled pineapple isn't impressive to YOU, but I was certainly impressed with myself upon first pulling this off successfully! 

It's perfect alongside your favorite meat dish, atop a salad, or mixed in with your favorite grain. It would also be a delicious, fun dessert with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream. And it's super healthy: the only ingredient is pineapple. You can add oil, salt, and pepper if you want, but I think it's totally unecessary.

I quarter the pineapple using the technique my husband (the chef and former Hawaii resident!) taught me, which you can see in this video from about minute 1:15 to about 2:05.

 

I like them in big quarters because they're easier to monitor on the grill, won't slip through the slats, and there's just something satisfying about cutting into a big ole pineapple steak.

Set your grill to medium hot, and throw the pineaple right on. If you have the patience, do it low and slow for 20-30 minutes. You want to make sure that the sugar gets nice and caramelized, and that it's cooked all the way through. You'll likely end up flipping it a few times to check the progress: it's good to move them around to make sure they're cooked evenly, all the way through. Sometimes hot spots can trip you up, so just keep an eye on them. 

When they're done, they'll look like this: Deeeelicious!

Served here with carne asada, cilantro lime quinoa, grilled asparagus, and cabbage. (Photo by me.)

Have you ever grilled pineapple?

Eating Fresh Coconuts: a Tale of Woe

By Dani

My Hubs and I recently bought a VitaMix blender, and we have been whipping up delicious, healthy smoothies almost every morning for the last month or so. One upside to having a juicer or heavy-duty blender is that it makes us more adventurous -- I'm much more likely to buy produce that I'm not sure how to cook or prepare, because I figure I can always throw it in a smoothie if it doesn't work out.

There is a downside to this philosophy though, and it was made manifest with my most recent failed purchase: a peeled organic coconut.

It looked like this (minus the straw and fancy stand, of course) and I thought, "hey it's already been peeled! We have loved fresh coconut on every tropical vacation we've ever been on! I've discovered smoothie-making heaven!" But it was not to be.

Once I got it home, I started choppping slivers of the outside "meat" off and put a few pieces into a smoothie. While most of the smoothie was greens and other fruits, this coconut made it completely undrinkable. There were tough, stringy fibers in every sip that could not be blended or chewed. In other words, it was super nasty.

So I started to think that the outside (even though it's peeled, perhaps the white part is still considered "husk"?) wasn't edible. However that means that there's very little usable in a coconut - just the water and the few teaspoon-fulls of flesh from the water cavity. Is that right? Perhaps being peeled (as was suggested in this Chowhound forum) is bad for the coconut and makes it tough?

This lady seems to think that opening up a fresh coconut and using every bit of it is a walk in the park. What do you think?

(Image credit: AgroFruits, who seem to also believe that peeled coconuts taste great and I am a failure.)

Lots of Watermelon? Juice it!

by Elissa

My kids love watermelon and can eat a lot of it, but even so, the four of us have a hard time getting through a full-sized watermelon by ourselves. I recently discovered the perfect use for leftover watermelon:

It doesn't take much time or effort--crush up cubed watermelon in a bowl or cocktail shaker (using a muddler, a large spoon, a potato masher--whatever!)  Strain the resulting watermelon slush through a mesh strainer. Voila! My son enjoyed his juice straight up, while my husband and I added a squeeze of lime and a shot of cachaca (a Brazilian spirit made from sugar cane--I bet vodka or rum would also be excellent). A perfect late-summer drink!

Figs for Dinner

by Tara

Do you like figs? I haven't really eaten a lot of figs since elementary school. (That's as weird as it sounds. I went to a private, religious school for awhile and we were served figs as snacks a lot because, obviously, figs were Jesus's favorite fruit because there are fig trees mentioned in the New Testament.)

Anyway, I saw this recipe on one of Nic's Recipe Round-ups on this beautiful site (which, by the way, is a GREAT way to find new recipes for your weekly/monthly meal plans), and was excited to try it. I finally found some fresh figs at a local hippie store, picked up some chicken at my butcher shop, and went for it.

SO GOOD.

Seared Chicken Cutlets with Blue Cheese, Figs and Parsley

Picture taken right before I devoured half of the food on this platter.

I doubled the spinach, (and burned the garlic, but whatever) and it was a DELICIOUS meal. Highly recommend.

Do you like figs? What's your favorite fig recipe?

Peaches!

by Elissa

I have been infatuated with fresh peaches this summer. Eating them as-is is always wonderful when you can get your hands on really ripe fruit. But I've been buying so many peaches that I've had to branch out. Here are a few options if you find yourself with an abundance of peaches.

The simplest option is one I learned about on the blog Sweet Amandine. She desribed a recipe ff Nigel Slater's that sounded so good I was just itching to try it. It involves making a paste of almonds, sugar, and butter (I also added a generous pinch of salt), spreading the paste on top of peach halves, and baking until the top is crispy and the fruit is concentrated and silky. So easy! So good! Try it today! (Unfortunately we ate these baked peaches so quickly that I never took a picture).

Next in terms of difficulty is a peach galette that I made based on this recipe for apple galette from Dinner: A Love Story (the only change I made was adding a couple of teaspoons of cornstarch to keep the peach juice from getting out of control).

The crust ripped while I was folding everything, but I just kept going and it turned out great. I was able to make the crust out of recycled pie dough scraps that I had frozen and the galette was no worse for wear. Definitely simpler than making a pie.

Finally, I made a peach pie that was pretty fantastic.

I went with my favorite pie crust recipe and adapted the proportions from Cooks Illustrated for the filling: 6 cups sliced peaches, 1 tsp. lemon zest, juice from 1/4 lemon, 3/4 cup sugar, and 3 Tb. instant tapioca. Homemade pie is definitely a bit of a project, but this effort paid off and I think this has been my favorite pie of the summer.

Moral of the story: get some peaches and start baking! What's your favorite peach recipe?