Food Fun for Halloween

Halloween has always been a challenge for me……not only what costume to wear or make but how to keep the fun in Halloween and control the amount of sugar in my house. When my daughter was little I made special Halloween candy and had fruit available but admittedly, the fruit was plain and no fun at all. Check out these easy to re-create ideas from the  Eat Smart blog. 

Vegetable skeleton….good for adults, too! A spooky take on the vegetable platter.

I love this guy! Great idea for the kids and grown-ups. Serve with salad dressing for dipping. Great for a Halloween party table.

Clementines are yummy and sweet. Great for the kids.

There’s lots more to make and a thousand ways (or so it seems) to add sugar to the diet…..just the same, I don’t need to eat more sugar and having little ones jacked up on sugar isn’t my idea of a great time. Offering something healthy and yummy is a way to make a change.

Post by Eileen of GoofingOff Sewing….who cooks, too. The kitchen is just another place to Goof Off.

Create Magic With Every Stitch!

Green Beans With a Taste of Bacon

Like many other people who cook for a family I try to make nutritious food that tastes good. Easy....but I also like economical. Take green beans for instance.... nutritious and taste wonderful fresh from the garden but the price starts to climb if you buy them at the grocer or frozen.....and they don't look near as pretty from a can.....however, canned is cheap and if the liquid is saved it can be added to a vegetable soup....but they do taste kind of yuck compared to fresh. Here is a fix I got from a friend that I think is worth sharing. 

Green Beans with a Taste of Bacon

1 pound of green beans, washed and cut into small pieces
1 small onion, diced
4 slices bacon, diced
Salt, 1/2 tp
Pepper, dash
Sugar, 1/2 tp

Heat a skillet over a medium heat. Fry the bacon. With a slotted spoon remove the bacon bits and save. Add the onions to the grease and saute until clear and glossy. Add the green beans and stir coating the beans with the grease. Add the salt, pepper, and sugar. Stir. Add the bacon bits. 
Serve.

Diced Bacon in the Skllet

diced onions

Saute onions with bacon bits

Add green beans and season.

I used a beautiful, fresh Florida onion (part of one, really) but a regular Spanish onion can be used. I just couldn't resist the Florida one at the flea market. 
The green beans in the pictures are fresh. Canned green beans can be substituted but make sure they are well drained before adding them to the skillet.

To make this recipe a little healthier:
Saute the onions in olive oil. Add the green beans. Season. Add bacon bits (an uncured brand is preferable). Stir and serve. 

P.S. That's a cast iron skillet in the pics...not burnt black. Treated well and seasoned appropriately they last a lifetime or two without things sticking. Hard to use anything else after using these babies.

Post by Eileen Patterson.....who should be sewing but is GoofingOff....again. Ha ha.

The Volunteer Garden: Mini Spaghetti Squash

This year our garden is doing pretty good. Yellow squash and zucchini pickin’s are a little low but there’s plenty of eggplant, tomatoes, and broccoli to make me happy. The volunteers are the best of all. What’s a volunteer? It’s a plant that came up without any assistance from you. You didn’t  plant the seed or seedling, it just came up on its own. In our garden, we have volunteer tomatoes, pumpkin, watermelon, and spaghetti squash.

 

When the spaghetti squash first came up I thought they were honeydews. The plant, and the fruit, look sort of the same. They didn’t get very big, though, about the size of a large tomato. I baked a few and sure enough, that’s what they are, little spaghetti squash, just right for stir-fry. If you’ve never tried spaghetti squash you should. They are low calorie and sort of like tofu….they take on the flavor of whatever sauce you cook them with. We make a vegetable stir fry with them using soy sauce and oyster flavored sauce that comes out yummy….Cheap, fast, and easy. Served over rice and its a meal.

As for the tomatoes, the volunteer plants are as big as the deliberately planted ones, if not bigger.

I love the volunteers. A little small but hearty and determined to come into this world….and onto my table.

Post by Eileen Patterson.

The Volunteer Garden

Now matter how hard I try, a lot of my life is a bit haphazard. Maybe it’s because I have a “let the chips fall where they will” kind of attitude. Maybe it’s because at work I have to be so exact that I am in a continuous state of rebellion (mild, though, as I’ve aged….like wine and cheese). Maybe it’s because I am too tired to make everything just right. I don’t know, however, this laissez-faire (not lazy fair….thank you very much) attitude extends to most areas of my life. I make stews and soups (throw it in the crock pot with a few seasonings…easy, just act like it took forever and everyone thinks you are a genius), color outside the lines (those lines are suggestions), and garden volunteer style. What’s volunteer style? It is the lazy girl’s way of composting. No barrel, no pile, no turning, just bury the scraps, add water and presto! like magic, plants appear. For those of us who are OCD in the garden, this will not work but I choose to be OCD in other areas and let the garden do almost what it wants to. Besides, the last time I tried to compost the local critters and varmints thought it was a smorgasbord made just for them. Almost scared me out of my….never mind, that’s another story. Back to the volunteer garden.

The volunteer garden is a reflection of your eating habits, and sometimes your didn’t eat it  habits. Tomatoes do pretty good. What variety? The “I didn’t pay extra for seeds” variety. Watermelon, squash, and cantaloupe do OK as long as they get enough water. The onions are growing because they look good (and didn’t get chopped up in time). We have cucumbers growing, too, a few peppers, and even sweet potatoes. 

The sweet potatoes are my favorites. I got very lucky with these. I planned to plant some but by the time I got around to it I was a month late. I bought some pretty sweet taters at the store and put them in the pantry with plans to cook them….and promptly forgot they were there.

One day, while getting something out of the freezer, I felt something rub against my arm. After I calmed down I noticed it was a sweet potato vine, one of about a dozen. We planted the vines and let them grow.

Sweet potatoes have some of the prettiest flowers in the garden.

A few months later we harvest the sweet potatoes. Here’s the harvest.

Not a lot, about 1/2 of a 5 gallon bucket. Imagine if I’d of planted them sooner.

Post by Eileen Patterson.