Crisp Leaves and Root Cellar Foods

The Farmers Market has closed for the season hear in Minneapolis. Which means we are moving towards winter and eating lots of root vegetables! It is sad to bed farewell to all of the tomatoes and peppers that I have been eating, but I do love root vegetables.

One pleasant and simple fall meal that partner and I enjoyed recently was creamy parsnip soup with yoghurt and herb muffins spread with goat cheese. For some reason I didn't eat parsnips very often growing up, but I now really enjoy their slightly sweet, earthy taste. They look like white carrots.

The soup is Curried Parsnip Soup with shredded apples from Epicurious.com:


While the soup is simmering you can make the muffins. I used the recipe for Yogurt and Herb Bread from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen who wrote all of the Moosewood Cookbooks, except I made them as muffins

• 1 cup unbleached white hlour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 tep baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup yogurt
• 1/3 cup honey
• 1/2 tsp each - oregano, thyme, basil, tarragon

Mix all ingredients well and pour into a greased muffin pan. Cook at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes

Tomato Soup + Grilled Cheese

I'll give you the punchline quick: the key to any good creamy soup is... cream cheese! This applies to tomato soup, but I have also had great success with cauliflower soup, broccoli soup and many others. I think cream cheese, even low fat cream cheese, gives soup a really nice creamy texture when compared to milk.

This is more or less an original recipe if you can really call it a recipe. In terms of the goals of this blog: cheap, quick, and local (and healthy) this meal does fairly well. It's definitely fast, and I would say healthy, you could use local tomatoes (I didn't). I did use organic tomatoes and I am pretty sure it still comes out fairly inexpensive.

Garlic infused olive oil from PD Farms!

Tomato Soup

1/2 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp olive oil
2 cans tomatoes
1 tsp basil
1 tsp honey
1/4 cup cream cheese

Saute onion in olive oil until onions are translucent. Add garlic and saute an additional 30 seconds. Add tomatoes an other ingredients (except for cream cheese) and simmer 20 to 30 minutes. Taste and adjust flavors if necessary. I don't usually add salt because there is quite a bit in most canned tomatoes, but if you used no "salt added" tomatoes you might want to.

About this much basil

Puree soup. I use an immersion blender which I highly recommend, but any blender works. Add cream cheese and heat until cream cheese is melted.





Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

mmmm cheese and roasted peppers

Again, not sure if this constitute a recipe, but there is something about a good sandwich, especially a good grilled cheese sandwich. For this one I used whole grain bread, extra sharp cheddar and roasted red peppers. I really like roasted red peppers on grilled cheese.