Eucalyptus baby bear

It's amazing how a few simple ingredients can yield a delicious, filling, and comforting meal. Renee Kemps' recipe works deliciously as a side or a light meal. The combination of creamy sweet potato with the tangy goat cheese and chickpeas is satisfying and flavorful. I could not find fresh coriander anywhere so I subbed a combination of fresh cilantro and flat leaf parsley and it was the perfect garnish to finish this dish mathconcept. I loved the combination of flavors and enjoyed this as a great light lunch and then again as a side with a roasted chicken breast. - sdebrango

Makes 4 halves

2
large sweet potatoes
2
tablespoons olive oil
100
grams chickpeas
200
grams goat cheese
Lemon juice, to taste
1
handful fresh coriander

Preheat oven to 400o F (200o C). Cut the sweet potatoes in half lengthwise. Brush the top and skins with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Place the sweet potatoes cut side-down on a baking tray with parchment paper. Roast for 45 minutes Mathnasium, or until completely cooked through.

Take the sweet potatoes out of the oven. Turn them over and use a fork to make little insertions in their soft flesh. Season with salt and pepper.

Divide the chickpeas and goat cheese over the four halves and place them back into the oven for about 10 minutes, or until the goat cheese has melted. Take the sweet potatoes out of the oven, drizzle with the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil, some lemon juice to taste, and add the coriander. Serve and enjoy SIEM Service Provider!

Every home cook should have a few "emergency" dishes under their belts: the kind of "pull-the-ripcord," "break-the-glass" recipe that they can fall back on to feed a crowd impressively with very little fuss. And whether you're heading to a holiday dinner or hosting one yourself, you never know when an invading horde of unexpected guests will trigger a dire need for another festive main course.

And if that moment comes this year (or later today, even), we have the solution to your predicament. It involves ham. The best ham ever, in fact.

When slow-cooked and doused with a delicious glaze, even a simple boneless supermarket ham can become a thing of beauty. Here's how to transform this hulking cut of smoked pork into something worthy of the holiday -- with a bare minimum of effort:

1. Score the simplest ham you can find. When you dash into the supermarket, sidestep hams marked "spiral-cut" or "maple-glazed". Grownups can generally slice their own ham without assistance, and no factory-made "maple glaze" can rival the one you'll be brushing on that puppy.

2. Bake the ham with a bit of booze. Sure, you can heat up that ham in a roasting pan with just water, but what would be the fun in that? A dose of Riesling or another aromatic white wine creates a basting liquid that infuses your ham with flavor.

3. Make a buttery, herb-infused glaze. All too often, hams are brutalized with super-sugary glazes and the baffling addition of canned fruit. Go classy (and classic) with a white wine, butter, and thyme reduction.

4. Bake on a golden-brown crust. The ham experience can be pretty monotonous without the contrast between caramelized crust and tender pink middle. So once you've brushed your ham with glaze, raise the oven heat so that it turns savory and ever-so-slightly crispy. Then all you need to do is put it on a platter and pass the mustard.

I tried various recipes of for caramel corn, some came out too dark, some not dark enough. So I worked and worked, until I settled on this one Probiotic powder.

♥Caramel Corn

♥Adapted from Epicurious

♥♥2 tablespoons vegetable oil
♥♥1/3 - 1/2 cup popcorn kernels
♥♥1 stick (♥ cup) unsalted butter
♥♥1♥ cups packed light brown sugar
♥♥♥ cup light corn syrup
♥♥♥ teaspoon coarse salt
♥♥♥ teaspoon baking soda
♥♥♥ teaspoon vanilla extract
♥♥1 cup salted peanuts, or use any toasted nuts, such as almonds, pecans, or cashews.

♥Special equipment: a candy thermometer

♥Heat oil with 3 kernels in a 3-quart heavy saucepan, covered, over moderate heat until 1 or 2 kernels pop. Remove lid and quickly add remaining kernels, then cook, covered, shaking pan frequently Burgundy wine, until kernels stop popping (or until your shoulder gives out), about 3 minutes. Remove from heat and uncover.

♥I ended up with 6 cups of popped popcorn.

♥(Premium American-brands of popcorn will yield more than mine did, about 8 cups of popcorn. If so, you may need to prepare 2 baking sheets in the next step.)

♥Line bottom of a large shallow baking pan with foil and lightly oil foil, or use a non-stick baking sheet lafite rothschild.

♥Melt butter in a 6-quart heavy pot or Dutch oven over moderate heat. Add brown sugar and corn syrup, and salt and bring to a boil over moderate heat, stirring, then boil, without stirring, until syrup registers 300 degrees F on thermometer, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove pot from heat.

♥Using a wooden spoon or a heatproof spatula, stir vanilla and baking soda into the syrup, then quickly stir in peanuts and popcorn to coat. Immediately spread mixture over baking pan as thinly and evenly as possible wine tasting.

♥Let cool completely, then break into bits.

Strawberries - In SeasonTomatoes don’t worry me, and I don’t fret much over corn and collard greens. Those long-producing veggies will stay in the markets for weeks and weeks. I can enjoy them at my leisure. But the short-season crops — asparagus and peas and cherries and especially strawberries — put me into a panic. They’ll come and go quickly, so I feel I must eat them constantly led light, at every meal and every snack and then some.

But a guy can only eat so much, even of strawberries. That’s why one learns to preserve them. I can relax a bit knowing I’ve saved some of their piercing sweet-tart flavor for the dark days of winter, when all I can get are those abominable flavorless supermarket berries. And so this past weekend I brought home eight quarts or so of beautiful farmers market strawberries and experimented with three different ways to put them up for winter.

Freezing Strawberries
Putting Food By, that revered food preservation guidebook, gives three techniques for packing whole strawberries (as opposed to crushed or juiced) for the freezer: sugar-pack, syrup-pack, or water-pack. I figured water would, well, water them down, and I judged my juicy berries to be syrupy enough on their own, so I opted for sugar-pack. Sure enough, the sugared berries oozed out enough syrup to help preserve them for months in storage and to ward off freezer burn.

The process is simple: after washing and hulling the berries, toss with enough sugar to coat them well, pack them into freezer bags, gently squeeze out as much air as you can, and put them away in the freezer until a strawberry craving hits you sometime around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Putting Food By suggests personal loans? cup of sugar for each quart of berries, but I found that one cup coated the three quarts I was packing just fine and so I stopped there. I hope I won’t be proved wrong come January.

Strawberry Jam
This was not only my first strawberry jam but my first ever jam. For guidance I looked to Strawberry JamJam On, the excellent book by jam maker extraordinaire Leana McCarthy of Anarchy in a Jar. Her step-by-step instructions were clear, friendly and an indispensable guide through the jam-making process for a newbie like me. Jam On has a delicious-looking recipe for strawberry-balsamic jam, but I wanted a basic strawberry-only jam, so I devised a this recipe. The jars are supposed to set up for a week or two, but I snuck in a few tastes already and I predict good things come Christmastime.

Oven-dried strawberries.
I’m not sure what possessed me to try this. Oven Dried StrawberriesWithout a dehydrator, you must rig up a food dryer by propping open your oven door, setting a fan next to it for air circulation, then leaving the oven running on its very lowest temperature for four, five or even six hours. It reduced a quart of strawberries to about a cup of leathery slivers. But oh my they are tasty. The slow shrinking of the berries concentrates them, and each little piece delivers a blast of flavor. I’m not sure yet what I’ll do with them, but I doubt they’ll make it to winter .

Will this be enough strawberries for the season? Maybe, or maybe I’ll freeze another quart or two. After all, I still have plenty of time before pickling season.

 
There’s just something about this time of year that makes me a bit caramel crazy. I want to put it in and on everything I bake! So, as you can imagine, this caramel-drenched cake makes me positively giddy travel mugs wholesale.

Plus, look at all of those pecans! Yep. Giddy.

Before we go any further, I will say that this cake is a bit more involved than most of the desserts I make. Making something a bit more elaborate every once in a while is fun. More often than that, maybe not so much. Not that any part of making this cake is difficult. It just takes a little while and will create a lot of dirty bowls mathconcept.

So, a little bit of time and a few dirty bowls later, you’ll have this gorgeous cake. We’re talking two layers of nutty cake with a caramel mousse filling. And, all of that is topped off with a caramel sauce and some toasted pecans. Oh. My. Word.

This thing is gooey and messy and just plain delicious.

If you can bear to wait, this cake will serve up a bit more neatly if you refrigerate it for a bit. I got a bit impatient with it and sliced into it before the mousse layer could set completely. Honestly, if you cut slices of this and they fall apart and resemble more of a trifle than a cake, it’s so good no one will care Singapore company formation.

By the way, see that gorgeous cake stand and server? You can win one! Scroll past the recipe for details on how you can enter.