Winner announced! Congrats, Manda – entry #8!

I have this belief that the preference for either cooking or baking over the other one is an indication of personality. For instance, the best bakers I know are typically Type A, Control Freak types who looooooove doing things with perfection and precision. I envy their attention to detail and focus while I’m running around my kitchen instead throwing dashes and splashes of herbs and oils into whatever I threw together in the skillet.

I typically prefer the experimental mixing and matching of flavors — a dash of this, a pinch of that — over exact measurements, the variation of which could drastically change (or damage) the end result. I find that very, very scary.

Am I afraid of failure? Do I lack patience? Maybe. Maybe I’m just soooo creative that I need a no-measurements allowed, do what feels good, free-love kind of kitchen.

Either way, I put my Big Girl Apron on and put all of that aside this week as I baked myself a Gluten-Free Applesauce Cake. And liked it. The process AND the cake.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

Outrageous Baking, based in my one-time-for-a-year hometown of Boulder, Colorado, offers the perfect solution for folks, who like me, want to add a few quality baked goods to their I-can-cook-that repertoire. BONUS: all of their products are gluten-free, and many of the recipes on their website are low-sugar and/or high protein.

Get your cupcake on, indeed.

For folks like me, there’s a handful of recipes on their website that are super simple. For folks like the rest of you who bake more than I do, you can substitute in this gluten-free flour for regular flour when you bake, making your favorite cookies, cakes, and breads gluten-free.

Don’t bake at all? Don’t sweat it. For you, the work is already done. Outrageous Baking also offers pre-baked goodies like Chocolate Zucchini Bread, Lemon Poppysead Bread, Pumpkin Bread and Coffee Cake. I frequently picked up the zucchini bread at various Boulder-area coffee shops when I lived there, and devoured the loaves they recently sent me to sample. They’re so good. Crumbly, moist, perfect. You can find all of those here.

Don’t believe me? Try it yourself!

Outrageous Baking is giving away a prize pack to one lucky Nomadic Foodie reader. In said prize pack, the winner will receive:

• Three 2-lb. loaves of their choice
• One 5-lb bag of gluten free flour mix to test out in your own recipes

You have three chances to enter. To do so, leave a comment below for each of the three entries you complete.

• Mandatory entry: Like Outrageous Baking on Facebook and follow @obgfbaking on Twitter. Leave a comment below letting me know you did so.
• Bonus entry #1: Answer me this: do you prefer cooking or baking? Why? What’s your favorite thing to cook or bake?
• Bonus entry #2: Follow @doniree on Twitter and like NomadicFoodie on Facebook.

doniree

Doniree Walker is the Nomadic Foodie. She loves the exploration and community of food, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves the region's focus on local and seasonal food, daily farmers' markets and food carts at seemingly every turn. She's on twitter as @doniree and @nomadicfoodie, and blogs her adventures and life in general at doniree.com.

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Is there anything better than the most delicious meal of your life that happens to leave you feeling like you can take on the world, rather than bloaty and sluggish and desperate for a food-coma-induced nap? There isn’t, actually, and while I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this recipe is that meal, it’s flavorful, indulgent, and colorful, and will also leave you feeling energetic and healthy.

I’m determined to develop a repertoire of meals that are packed with flavor and high in nutrients. This is one of those meals.

Recipe | Gluten-Free Poached Egg with Kale, Peppers, Cheese and Toast

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 1 piece of bread (I used Udi’s Gluten-Free White Bread)
• Cheese of choice (I used a raw milk cheddar cheese from Trader Joe’s)
• 2 Tablespoons chopped red bell pepper
• 1 cup chopped kale
• olive oil
• salt and pepper

Instructions

Heat 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil in a pan over medium-high heat. Once hot, add chopped red peppers and kale. Using tongs or a spatula, flip/saute to ensure even coating of olive oil. Sprinkle a little salt and cook until the kale begins to wilt just a little and the peppers are tender, about 5-7 minutes.

Meanwhile, poach an egg (I have an egg poacher, which I highly recommend, but here’s a tutorial), or cook the egg however you prefer (if I’m not poaching it, I like mine scrambled or over-medium). Poaching, for me, takes about 10 minutes.

While the egg and veggies are doing their thing on the stove-top, toast your bread. Top the bread with cheese, veggies, and your egg (however you cooked it). Season with salt and pepper.

doniree

Doniree Walker is the Nomadic Foodie. She loves the exploration and community of food, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves the region's focus on local and seasonal food, daily farmers' markets and food carts at seemingly every turn. She's on twitter as @doniree and @nomadicfoodie, and blogs her adventures and life in general at doniree.com.

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One of the best things about the holiday season is the food, right? Right. There are so many traditions around Thanksgiving feasts, holiday parties, Christmas breakfast, and winter cocktails. I’ve got my favorites for each of those categories, but nothing’s quite as awesome as holiday party appetizers, amiright? I’d have to say that holiday party appetizers are one of my absolute most favorite traditions about this season. I mean, yes, the music, lights, giving, loving, friends, and family are all wonderful things about this season but let’s be honest. I’m going to make this about food.

Here’s the thing about Deviled Eggs: these are so, so easy to customize with different flavors and textures and the possibilities for creativity and flavor are endless. I’ve heard of people adding bacon, onions, shrimp, cheese, etc., so the possibilities are endless. I’ve always sort of prided (is that a word?) myself on my deviled eggs. They’re not that crazy, and sure, there are PLENTY of ways to spruce them up a bit. But my go-to recipe is simple, slightly sweet, and packed with just the right amount of flavors. And here it is:

Ingredients

• 4 eggs
• 2 1/2 tablespoons mayonnaise (my recipe for homemade mayonnaise)
• 1 1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon sweet pickle relish
• 1-2 teaspoons Cholula Hot Sauce (or, if you’re really adventurous, Sriracha)
• paprika

As a note, I halved the relish for the recipe I made because some crazy man I live with doesn’t like relish. The measurements here reflect the correct amount for the full recipe, but if you’re adapting this for pickier eaters, split it accordingly.

Instructions

This is the most basic way I make my deviled eggs, and I think this recipe provides the absolutely perfect canvas to whatever you want to do with it.

Hard boil the eggs. Let them cool completely before trying to handle them. Trust me, these get hot. Don’t burn yourself. If you’ve got time, you can let them cool to room temperature, then let them chill in the refrigerator for a half hour or so. I don’t have that kind of time, so I soak them in a bowl of ice water for about 20 minutes. Like this:

ice, ice baby

Once the eggs have cooled, slice them in half, length-wise.

Scoop the yolk out of each of the eggs into a bowl and mash with a fork.

Add the mayonnaise, mustard, sweet relish, and hot sauce. Note that you can adjust the hot sauce according to your preference. Less spicy, less sauce. More spicy, more sauce. You get it.

Spoon back into the hollowed-out eggs, and top with a sprinkle of paprika. If you’re feeling really fancy, garnish with parsley.

Another note: adding the relish thins out the filling a little bit, so if you prefer yours a bit thicker, scale back on the mayo a bit. Or, do what I do and stick them in the fridge for about a half hour to firm them up a little.

Willamette Egg Farms EGG-cellent Holiday Facebook Contest

I entered the top photo on this post in the Willamette Eggs Farm EGG-cellent Holiday Facebook Contest because there’s a prize of a Visa gift card worth $100. Those are my favorite kind of prizes. The ones that are money. Or that act like money. A $100 Visa gift card definitely acts like money.

First of all, a brief lesson for you non-Pacific Northwesters. Repeat after me:

“It’s the Will-AM-it, Dammit.”

Not WILL-uhh-mette, but will-AM-it. Rhymes with dammit. Ok, now that we’ve got that covered.

How are you using eggs this holiday season?

Create your favorite EGG-cellent Holiday dish and post a photo on the Willamette Egg Farms Facebook. More specifically, from their contest rules:

Show us how you’re using eggs this holiday season! Share an original photo of your favorite holiday recipe or tradition featuring eggs on our Facebook wall. The photo with the most Facebook likes will take home a $100 Visa gift card to help cover holiday groceries, so share your photo with friends to boost votes!

Official details and timelines can be found here. Pretty cool, huh?

Disclosure: I got a nice little Visa gift card from Willamette Egg Farms to help cover the groceries for this dish, in exchange for sharing the news about their Facebook contest with you fine folks. Now, go forth and enter — and let me know if you do, so that I can vote for your photo!

doniree

Doniree Walker is the Nomadic Foodie. She loves the exploration and community of food, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves the region's focus on local and seasonal food, daily farmers' markets and food carts at seemingly every turn. She's on twitter as @doniree and @nomadicfoodie, and blogs her adventures and life in general at doniree.com.

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It started with this.

This is a Cinderella Pumpkin Soup, and I devoured politely sampled this Cinderella Pumpkin Soup at Hotel 1000 in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. I was invited to attend their Vintimate Winemakers’ Dinner, which is an amazing pairing of a local winemaker’s wines (in this case, it was Upland Estates) with a local farm (Oxbow). The chefs at BOKA Kitchen + Bar (Hotel 1000′s restaurant) get a hold of the wines, grab some fresh fruits and veggies from Oxbow’s harvest, and whip up a tasting menu that’s one of the most perfect pairing of fresh and local flavors I’ve ever enjoyed.

Everything was delicious, but one dish in particular really stuck with me. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that soup! I mentioned that on Twitter, and Hotel 1000 responded with the promise to get me the recipe. Sure enough, I got it a few days ago. Well, kind of. I got the ingredient list:

Now, I’ve been on a crazy soup-making kick lately, so I was soooo excited to finally get to tackle this once Chris and I got home from the past week on the road. I picked up a couple of pumpkins at the grocery store and spent all-day Tuesday roasting pumpkins and letting the pumpkins cool so that by Tuesday night, our kitchen (AKA “The Lab”) was a full-fledged pumpkin soup-cooking experiment.

It took some experimenting to get the right amounts for each of the ingredients listed above, and I made a few edits. Actually, I made this twice — the first time, I started with a roux and used heavy cream as well as water and flavored with sage. The second time, I skipped the roux, made it dairy-free and sweetened it up a bit with maple syrup and cinnamon.

When all was said and done, I had my very own delicious version of this unforgettable pumpkin soup.

The first effort, garnished with fresh sage. This was good, but the recipe below was better.

Recipe | Easy Pumpkin Soup

This recipe makes four 8-oz. servings. If you’re serving this as an entree, that’s two servings. If it’s a starter or a side, it’ll be four.

Ingredients

• 2 3/4 to 3 cups roasted pumpkin* (I used small-to-medium sugar/pie pumpkins, and one pumpkin will be about 3 cups)
• 2 cups water
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 Tablespoon sugar (I imagine brown sugar would be just fine here, but I used white sugar)
• 1 cup white wine
• 1 Tablespoon [organic, HFCS-free] maple syrup

Method

*Roasted pumpkin: cut pumpkins in half, scoop out seeds and stringy stuff in the middle. Place open-side down in a baking dish and add about 1/4″ water. Bake at 350 degrees for 45-60 minutes. Let cool before handling.

Once pumpkin has cooled, use a spoon to scoop out the insides of the pumpkin into a bowl or directly into the pot you’ll be cooking in.

This is what roasted pumpkin looks like...

Heat slowly over medium heat. While pumpkin is heating, add white wine and water. Using an immersion blender (or a regular blender and working in batches), puree the pumpkin and liquids until it’s thin and smooth. Allow to simmer for a little while (10-15 minutes or so, stirring frequently) so that the alcohol in the wine cooks off. Trust me, you want to taste the flavor – not the booze.

...and this is what it looks like thinned out with water & wine.

Stir in salt, sugar, and maple syrup.

Recipe Notes

Maple Syrup: I know the recipe said to finish with this, but I added a tiny bit of syrup to the top of one of my taste-tests and holy game-changer. That little bit of savory sweetness is exactly what makes this so damn good.

Dairy: The texture of the pumpkin itself is creamy enough that you can completely skip adding any more cream. It’s also thick enough that starting with a roux is not necessary.

Vinegar: I wasn’t sure what type of vinegar to use, so I tried Apple Cider Vinegar the first time through. In the five cups of soup I was experimenting with, the 1/4 cup of ACV was so overpowering that it took another three cups of soup (pumpkin+water) to mellow it out. Skip the ACV and use white wine instead. Or… let me know if I should’ve used a different type of vinegar and maybe just a tablespoon, rather than a quarter cup.

Extra: I think caramelized onions would be a killer addition to this, either pureed in the soup with everything else, or as a garnish on top of that aforementioned créme fraiche.

Coming Soon | Roasted Butternut Squash Soup

I’ve got three roasted butternut squashes cooked and ready to soup-ify, and I’ll likely stick to this recipe, with two changes: obviously, I’ll sub the squash for the pumpkin. Second, there will be apples involved as well. Stay tuned!

doniree

Doniree Walker is the Nomadic Foodie. She loves the exploration and community of food, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves the region's focus on local and seasonal food, daily farmers' markets and food carts at seemingly every turn. She's on twitter as @doniree and @nomadicfoodie, and blogs her adventures and life in general at doniree.com.

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Live the good life with these titles.

I used to think squash (other than yellow/summer/zucchini squash) was intimidating. I mean this, I know what to do with.

[via]

Slice it, throw it in a skillet/saute pan, add some butter or oil, a little salt and pepper and call it a day. Maybe top it with some shredded Parmesan.

But this. This used to scare me. You can’t exactly slice and dice a spaghetti squash.

[via]

As it turns out though, this spaghetti squash is actually way more fun than the yellow squash (no offense to the yellow squash. I really, really like those too). Grab a sharp knife, slice the sucker in half, and then scoop out the fleshy part in the middle and all of the seeds. If you’re into roasted seeds, you can clean those off, dry them out, and roast them like pumpkin seeds.

Once you’ve removed the seeds, drizzle olive oil over each half of the squash and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake, upside down for 45-60 minutes at 425 degrees, until the insides are easy to pick apart with a fork. Once it’s baked and scraped, it’ll look like this — like stringy, squashy spaghetti.

Awesome, huh? There are a LOT of things you could do with spaghetti squash. For instance, you could:

• treat it like spaghetti noodles and cover it in your favorite marinara
• treat it like fettuccine and cover it with your favorite Alfredo sauce
• lightly toss with olive oil, salt, pepper, herbs, and parmesan
• add spaghetti squash with other roasted vegetables to a baking dish, throw in some heavy cream, top with shredded cheese and breadcrumbs and call it a casserole

Here’s what I did:

Roasted Spaghetti Squash Pizza Bake

I promise. This is super simple, and you’re going to love it.

Ingredients

• Roasted spaghetti squash (refresher course: slice a spaghetti squash in half, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and roast at 425 for 45-60 minutes)
• Shredded cheese (I used cheddar)
• Heavy cream
• Spaghetti Sauce
• Fresh Mozzarella

Instructions

Scoop the squash out of the peel, and transfer to a bowl. Lightly drizzle a little but of heavy cream in there, and toss in a handful or so of cheddar cheese. Transfer this mixture back to a small baking dish. Spoon spaghetti sauce over the top of it, and add sliced mozzarella.

Bake for 25-30 minutes at 400 degrees. I baked mine for 20 minutes and wish I’d let the cheese get a little bubblier.

Remove from the and let cool for 5 minutes. Serve hot.

Variations

The fun part about this dish and spaghetti squash in general is that it’s really, really versatile. Here are a few suggestions for adding a little spin to this super easy dish:

• Add cooked ground beef, turkey, chicken or your favorite veggie beef, turkey, or chicken substitute
• Add fresh veggies. I think mushrooms, broccoli, and green peppers would be great in here.
• Top with Parmesan cheese instead of Mozzarella.
• Use Alfredo sauce instead of a red sauce and stir in some shredded chicken.
• Use an enchilada sauce and top with chiles for a Mexican-food spin on it.
• Add 3-4 cheeses, a little more heavy cream and call it a Mac and Cheese kind of dish. Top with breadcrumbs.

doniree

Doniree Walker is the Nomadic Foodie. She loves the exploration and community of food, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves the region's focus on local and seasonal food, daily farmers' markets and food carts at seemingly every turn. She's on twitter as @doniree and @nomadicfoodie, and blogs her adventures and life in general at doniree.com.

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I don’t do a lot of baking. I don’t have the patience for perfect measurements, dough that needs to rise, and I don’t even own an electric mixer. But sometimes, you realize it’s mid-summer, there’s strawberries everywhere and rhubarb everywhere, and your boyfriend – ever so sweetly – starts hinting (daily) that his favorite pie might just be Strawberry Rhubarb Pie.

So, you dust off your apron, grab your rolling pin, and carefully get to work assembling the most perfect presentation of fruits and pastry dough you’ve ever put together.

No? Not even a little close? I don’t know about you, but that’s NOT quite how it worked here either. Chris did mention he’d love a Strawberry Rhubarb pie, and I jumped at the chance to try something new with my farmers’ market bounty.

I’ll admit – we totally cheated with the crust and bought a frozen one. Next time, I’ll make my own! Maybe.

This pie was super simple. Chop fruits, toss with tapioca or cornstarch (to thicken) and a couple of other things, dump in a pie crust and let it bake. My recipe was some combination of influence of this post from FOODgrl, and this one from Smitten Kitchen.

That’s it! Oh, and then enjoy its sweet and tart and tangy goodness and remember that we’re still in the dead middle of summer.

doniree

Doniree Walker is the Nomadic Foodie. She loves the exploration and community of food, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves the region's focus on local and seasonal food, daily farmers' markets and food carts at seemingly every turn. She's on twitter as @doniree and @nomadicfoodie, and blogs her adventures and life in general at doniree.com.

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I remember the first time I had a raw fruit/veggie juice. It was at the Whole Foods in Boulder (before it closed down), and my friend Monica had just been CRAVING this particular juice from the juice bar that had a name like “Juice Goddess,” or “Veggie Diva,” or something like that. I watched as greens after greens went through the juicer, followed by carrots, and beets, and lemongrass, and other things I’d have never considered sipping.

Monica swore that not only was it SO nutritious (all vitamins! no added sugar!), it was also really, really delicious. So, I sipped. And I liked! I was amazed that I couldn’t taste the spinach or kale (or both?), and that the sweetness from the carrots and the beets was subtle and refreshing.

That was last summer sometime, so let’s fast forward to today. My eating habits are a continual evolution and [hopefully] improvement as I learn more and more about how my body feels and functions best. We eat out all the time (because the restaurants here are amazing and obsessed with sourcing everything locally), but when it comes to stuff like this, I love being able to do this at home.

Joe Youngblood, a friend and marketing coordinator at UMoveFree (a service that hooks renters up with Lancaster, TX apartments) is an avid runner and triathlete. He says,

“I like to cook and eat my own meals at home. not only do you save money but you can also track the exact ingredients of your meal and control portions better.”

I totally agree, and with stuff like homemade juices – it’s also cheaper.

After seeing alllll of the fresh fruits and veggies at the farmers’ market, I’ve been considering more and more this idea of a juicer, so that even if I haven’t quite figured out yet how to COOK beets, perhaps I could juice those little suckers and enjoy them that way.

Juicers are not expensive.

Or at least they don’t have to be.

I’d seen price tags on juicers like the VitaMix and others that cost upwards of $500-600, and I thought it’d be eons before I actually found a juicer I was willing to pay for. Enter Suki. She tweeted a sale on Amazon for the juicer SHE uses that costs a whopping $50. Now, without her positive review of this, I don’t know that  I’d have trusted it at $50, since I thought juicers were “supposed” to cost hundreds of dollars. Nope, she swore by this one, and linked me to the Waring Pro Juice Extractor. Done and done.

I bought it, and within a couple of days, it showed up at my doorstep (well, apartment door since I don’t really have a doorstep). I was a little nervous at first, but the Internets (and the owners’ manual) had some information for me. Suki, among many others, encouraged me to start with a simple Apple+Carrot+Ginger juice, and then move on from there.

Bingo bango. I started with this easy recipe from Food.com:

• 4 carrots
• 2 apples
• 1/4 inch slice of fresh Ginger root

Put it all in the juicer. Juice. Drink.

It’s a gorgeous drink, packed with vitamins, and is just sweet enough to taste like a treat, but not the least bit “too sugary,” since it doesn’t have all the added sugars shelf-stable juices need to not go bad. (Note: Fruit should eventually go bad. It’s fruit. It shouldn’t have a shelf-life.)

I’d like to learn how to juice greens, so if you have any tips on what exactly I should do to (and add to) kale and spinach juices, let me know!

http://www.umovefree.com/City/lancaster-apartments-tx/ lancaster tx apartments Lancaster

doniree

Doniree Walker is the Nomadic Foodie. She loves the exploration and community of food, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves the region's focus on local and seasonal food, daily farmers' markets and food carts at seemingly every turn. She's on twitter as @doniree and @nomadicfoodie, and blogs her adventures and life in general at doniree.com.

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