I have fond memories of making radish sandwiches with my grandparents in Minnesota. We would generously slather butter on sandwich bread and pile on thinly sliced radishes. These sandwich lunches have such a special place in my memory; I’ve probably mentioned them several times. After we finished the buffet of sandwich combinations — you know how grandmas are food-pushers — we would make a “dessert sandwich” with layers of butter, peanut butter, and maple syrup.

I also enjoy sliced radishes on a toasted and buttered baguette. What else do you do with radishes?

Crispy Prosciutto Cups
Adapted from Managing PCOS for Dummies (Odd, I know.)
Lightly grease four cups of a muffin pan. Line the cups with paper-thin slices of prosciutto. (Next time I’ll try using Colpitts’ shaved ham.)
Dry fry a couple of tablespoons of finely chopped mushrooms to release and evaporate the moisture. Cool. Mix with 2–3 T. of plain Greek yogurt.
Fill each ham-lined cup with the mushroom mixture.
Carefully crack an egg on top of each “muffin,” taking care not to let the egg white spill over the edges.
Bake in the middle of a 400˚ oven for 10 minutes, or until the egg whites are set, but the yolks are runny.
Remove from oven and carefully ease each ham crisp out of the tin.

September 14. Potato cakes, chard, tomatoes, blue cheese.

Use leftover mashed potatoes to make potato cakes! Inspired by Deborah Madison.
Use your hands to shape the mashed potatoes into patties. Coat them with sesame seeds, bread crumbs, potato chip crumbs, etc. Pan fry.

Note: If you don’t want to freeze them—if you want hash browns right now, dang it!—just blot the grated potatoes with tea towels or give them a ride in a salad spinner. Otherwise, they’ll be too wet for pan frying.

Do you any other ideas for preserving potatoes? Have you had luck freezing potato soup? Once I froze shepherd’s pie, which—once thawed—rendered it a disgusting, inedible mess. So, I’m hesitant to freeze cooked potatoes. Also, do you put ketchup on your hash browns? I’ll pass on the ketchup, but I love to place a slightly runny fried egg atop my crispy hash browns. I know what I’m having for breakfast tomorrow!

At Thanksgiving I learned a trick from Matt’s mom. For the post-Thanksgiving breakfast she mixed flour and a beaten egg with the mashed potatoes and formed and pan-fried potato patties. They were really tasty! I bet you could do the same thing with the sweet potato casserole.

I was very excited to attempt to make biscuits with rendered lard. I found a couple recipes online. I find it annoying that I had to use the internet to find a recipe for a centuries-old concept. And I am still disappointed that my new book, Fat (as in cooking fats), doesn’t have a biscuit recipe. None of my cookbooks have recipes that call for lard. Where can I find recipes that use real, minimally processed fats? Or can I just substitute lard when recipes call for shortening?

I was optimistic as I made that morning batch (indeed, there was more than one batch). The dough was a pleasure to work with, not heavy or sticky like the previous—albeit few—biscuit recipes I’ve tried.

But, the biscuits didn’t rise. And it wasn’t until clean-up that I realized I forgot to add the salt. And…I wasn’t exactly sure that I stuck to one recipe. (I had two very similar recipes on the counter.) Apparently, baking should not commence until I’ve had a cup of coffee.

Some good news came out of breakfast, though. We opened a jar of the ground cherry jam and it was truly a jam, not a runny “topping.” (It was still runny when I put the jars away back in October.) It was very tasty on the hockey-puck biscuit.

Sunday flew by; I dried a batch of grapefruit rinds in the oven. It made the kitchen smell of sugar cookies. I decided to attempt biscuits again for supper with a ground beef, gravy, and vegetable mixture ladled on top. I cranked up the oven to 400˚ and proceeded to follow one recipe. All of sudden, the sugar cookie smell was polluted by the smell of acrid, smoking grapefruit rind. I had forgotten to remove the rinds from the oven!

In all that commotion, I turned off the oven. And then I put the biscuits in the oven without remembering to turn the oven back on. I was happy to see the biscuits rising, but was puzzled when the biscuits were taking far longer than the 15 minutes the recipe called for. Luckily, Matt noticed that the oven was off. Once it heated back up, the biscuits finished baking but the bottoms were burned. Overall, though, their texture showed promise. I’m betting the third time will be a charm. I’ll be sure to report back.

Nothing fancy here. Just a yummy breakfast: an improvisational frittata and a broiled grapefruit. Really, this is an anytime meal.

I chronically misspell frittata. I just want those double ts to be at the end.

Frittatas are becoming my favorite receptacle for food on the brink of badness (and not in a good way). I use this recipe for general guidance. Excess greens (cooked or fresh), pruny mushrooms or potatoes, homemade salsa that’s really not very good—in it goes!

As I was making my breakfast smoothie this morning, I cooked some cream of bulgur for my sack lunch. Cream of bulgur is parboiled wheat berries that have been finely ground—similar to Cream of Wheat but better for you, since Bob uses the whole grain. To prepare it, you use one part cream of bulgur and three parts liquid. Today I used a combination of beef broth and milk for my cooking liquid. Once cooked, but still on the burner, I stirred in chunks of white cheddar cheese. Then I put a generous scoop of the creamed bulgur in my lunch container and then added a generous heap of cooked greens. Freshly cooked greens would be ideal, but lately I’m doing good to use these. They are tasty, thanks to the bacon fat, no doubt. One sec—I gotta take a bite of my nutritious mush meal. Yummmm…

My smoothie was quite good too. I make several servings at once and store them in the freezer for rushed mornings (which is to say, every morning). Blend up:

Wagon Creek Farm plain creamline yogurt
frozen cherries
a scoop of Ovaltine
a handful of pecans
a scoop of wheat bran from the Prairie Rose Permacultured Kitchen
flax seed meal

Yum!

So far this month, I have purchased some apples from the Edmond farmers’ market and the co-op.  The Little Red Barn Orchard in Norman grows organic apples and doesn’t put wax on the skin. I suppose waxy coatings aren’t needed when the apples aren’t shipped across the globe. Lest you think I am an Okie apple purist, please know that I drool and sometimes succumb to the delicious Pink Lady apples, usually hailing from New Zealand.

A couple of weeks ago I canned some apples and peaches:

Apples with “character.”

This weekend I followed these directions for making apple pie filling and freezing it for later.


You freeze the apples in a lined pie dish. Once solid, remove the dish, wrap the apples up, and store in the freezer!

And for breakfast today we had apple crisp—one of my favorite things to make. Apple slices, spices, lemon juice, and sugar topped with oats, nuts (if you like), brown sugar, salt, flour, butter, and spices. Make extra crisp and freeze it for later.

Drizzled with yogurt, this crisp is the perfect breakfast for these brisk mornings we’ve been enjoying.

Saturday morn: casserole with a fried egg and so-not-local grapes and cherries. Oh, and my cold brew iced coffee. Nummy, nummy. (I’ve been hanging out with a 1-year-old tonight.)

Sunday mornin’: casserole with fried egg and some caramelized apples. The apples came from the tree in the front yard.
I mean—not that very morning—they were sliced and frozen several weeks back.

These photos illustrate how an inexpensive, tasty dish can go a long way. This recipe for bulgur casserole, from the Bulgar Bugle, provided six delicious meals (three meals for two people). I made it with Bob’s Bon Appetetin’ cream of bulgur wheat and the beef stock I made in May. This casserole is a new comfort food. It feels nourishing.

And since I had to thaw more stock than I needed for the recipe, I used the remaining beef stock to cook 6 cups of bulgur. After it cooled, I spooned it into lined containers and put it in the freezer. Once it was frozen solid, I popped out the bulgur bricks, put them in a freezer bag (the freezer is packed and the bags fit better) and back in the freezer they go. Convenience food!